Re:I ask 100 information questions to four digital assistants
by makmanalp on Friday June 30, 2017 @05:53PM
(#14673800)
> a voice UI invites people to think about the other end of the conversation as a person
It's not the voice UI that does this, it's the marketing.
If they sold it as "speak your google search terms", it'd work a lot better. It'd also be a lot less sexy, but that's still mostly what it is IMHO. Not to say that it isn't impressive stuff, it is! But it's highly oversold, still.
Re:I ask 100 information questions to four digital assistants
by dahart on Friday June 30, 2017 @01:24PM
(#14672214)
Yes! Voice is sort-of "tactile" if you will. The process of speaking instead of typing may well cause us to expect a more human interaction. I bet they're already studying this effect and changing search results for voice searches accordingly, but it will be fun to watch how it unfolds.
Very nice article, I only skimmed so far, but I think I agree with all of it. It has a definitely pro-consumer bent that I wish would come true, but seems like trends are in the other direction. I suspect there's too much money in search and improving query understanding at scale for companies that get there to be as transparent and open and sharing as this author is asking.
Re:I ask 100 information questions to four digital assistants
by redler on Friday June 30, 2017 @03:32PM
(#14673125)
The fact that we interact by voice leads toward a sort of inadvertent theory-of-mind about the other party, which makes the pulling away of the curtain with so many of the answers much more jarring. Voice interaction seems to recruit a much deeper evolutionary expectation than the much more recent phenomenon of typing and reading.
Re:I ask 100 information questions to four digital assistants
by acdha on Friday June 30, 2017 @04:50PM
(#14673524)
Yes! I wonder whether that's an argument in favor of things like deliberately using quasi-robotic styles to help people recognize the limitations faster. It'll be interesting to see what product designers come up with and how the market adapts to this.
There's a really interesting discussion to be had about how UI decisions can make that process smoother — I really liked https://bigmedium.com/speaking/design-in-the-era-of-the-algo... as a call for how you can make the failure modes of the system more graceful. I think a lot of the success in the next decade or so is going to come from the places which figure out good answers for not making a system which seems to promise more than it can deliver.