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▲ swatcoder a day ago

Nah. In the big picture, voice can only ever be a complementary interface, not a widespread substitute.

It's fundamentally some combination of slow, imprecise, and ambiguous for most practical tasks and more importantly it places heavy demands on both the environment and the capabilities of the user.

It can be profoundly satisfying or efficient when the stars align over those limitations, but in the scheme of what we want computer-operated tools to do, these scenarios ends up covering a very narrow set of use cases.

The ultimate problem with voice interfaces wasn't technological, but biological/sociological: most people are simply inarticulate and impatient. They don't have the capacity to express themselves well in speech and don't have the patience to trudge through misunderstanding and clarification cycles -- especially when they lack the reflective insight to understand why they're being misunderstood. That's why they're not public speakers or writers or counselors or programmers or such (and even many of them are poorly suited). So even while the most limiting technological barriers may have been cracked open now, we'll still have to produce tool controls that accommodate these inarticulate, impatient people.