I still don't find voice activation to be very good in the cases I've used it. The problem of transcribing what you're saying seems to be solved pretty well, but (at least in the applications I've used it in - which is just navigation via google maps on my phone) there still seems to be an inherent problem of discoverability.

It took me a fair bit of trial and error to work out the exact magic words to say to get google maps to launch navigation to a given address by car without requiring me to use the touch screen at all.

My natural inclination was to say "Hey Google, give me directions to 123 fake street" but this would bring up a route (or if you're especially unlucky a list of different places for you to choose from) but require you to press a "start" button with your finger, and often also require you to switch the navigation type from bus/walk/cycle to car manually too.

"Give me directions to 123 fake street by car" would skip the navigation type selection, but still require you to manually press a "start" button (various variations of "ok google, begin" or "ok google, start" etc didn't seem to do anything")

After a long period (months) of having to press a tiny button manually while driving to start navigation I finally discovered that if you say "Navigate to" rather than "Give me directions to" it would skip past the start button screen and jump straight to giving you directions.

So now it works great, but I hope I don't have to go through tedious trial and error with everything voice activated to work out the exact phrasing it wants.

I had to look up the voice command to cancel the current directions without touching the phone. It's "exit navigation," which is very similar to the command you found to start them.

All of these commands printed out on a list somewhere would probably be consistent, and make sense. But you don't get to see that list. Google and others want to present these systems as magical AI helpers that you just converse with, as if they had any more intelligence than a touch tone menu system circa 1990.

Knowing how these things work, it just strikes me as hubris. The UX isn't good because they can't admit that the whole system isn't as good as they say it is or want it to be, and this makes them opaque and frustrating to interact with.

I think that's because we're in the very early stages of a transitional period. The end goal is something like the Star Trek computer, free-form natural language queries ending in desired actions. I think this approach of filing off all the rough edges (namely, handling every possible unique way of phrasing a specific intent) is a dead end.

What we have nowadays is more like a voice-input command line, with all of the stiltedness and attention to detail when crafting your input that requires.

A voice input command line is exactly what we need.

Unfortunately people want to pretend that natural language parsing can be solved, which, at least, for English is impossible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow;_frui...

The sentence you highlighted struck me as simultaneously remarkably vacuous as well as easily falsified.

This is a bit apples to oranges. I wouldn't want to start dictating this comment to my computer in the middle of the office, for many reasons, one being that typing is the better input choice for short-form text, as it is for server/console commands. But voice input is exactly what I want when I'm tugging on pants wondering if I need a jacket for today while I'm running late.

Regardless of how you feel about these devices, that line from the article is so preposterous. How many people in the world lack access to toilets or drink able water? How many folks survive on next to nothing? The author seems to think the US or maybe the more developed world is 99.9999999% of the population. If anything, it just highlights the fear mongering exaggeration. Sad.

It's not meant to be a literal statement. It's hyperbole to make a point about how ubiquitous it's become.

There is always context and interpretation and what you think that the Autor ist missing is actually you who missed it.

The only situations I find voice commands easier/faster than just physically interacting with a device are when I can't use my hands. So in the car, and I guess while cooking or in the shower - although I've only bothered with it for navigation while driving.

Yes, the kitchen and the car are the places I have found Alexa and Siri (respectively) useful. Amazon had the Echo Dot on offer for £9 GBP last week, and I’ve been surprised how much more often Alexa does the right thing than Siri does (YMMV).