25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to my computer

Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by Wowfunhappy on Monday October 26, 2020 @12:54PM (#24898267)

> There's a reason that people use apps to get food delivery rather than calling.

Well, if I had some type of personal assistant who worked for me (as in, a real human), I would just call out "Hey, Sam, please order pizza for me" and continue with whatever I was doing.

The reason people don't make phone calls is they add a lot of additional friction. You have to dial the number, and wait for someone to pick up, and give them your address, and deal with frequently-questionable voice quality.

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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by kibwen on Monday October 26, 2020 @01:32PM (#24898709)

Pizza is a weird example because pizza joint menus are more-or-less standard and unsurprising. For any non-pizza restaurant I'll want to start by scanning a menu, which is way more efficient than listening to a menu be read to me.

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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by wtetzner on Monday October 26, 2020 @02:07PM (#24899144)

And if you're already scanning the menu, just clicking on the stuff you want is easier than explaining it to someone.

However, if you frequently order the same thing from a given restaurant, having a way to order "the usual" from that place via voice might be convenient. But I'm not sure it's much more convenient than being able to do the same thing with a button click or something.

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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by ufmace on Monday October 26, 2020 @02:33PM (#24899468)

Your assistant is probably smart enough to remember what kind of pizza you like and from where, and will just order that unless you tell them something else. In theory, there's no reason your phone auto-assistant couldn't do the same thing, but we seem to be a long way from any of them having that level of intelligence.

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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by Wowfunhappy on Monday October 26, 2020 @02:58PM (#24899796)

Exactly! We aren't there yet technologically, but I think it's a worthy goal.

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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by dheera on Monday October 26, 2020 @12:59PM (#24898331)

I don't know, I like swiping through photos of food to make my decisions on what to eat, and then it only takes about 30 more seconds to complete the order at most.

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Re:25 Years In Speech Technology and I still don’t talk to m... by Godel_unicode on Monday October 26, 2020 @01:20PM (#24898581)

This is just the optimal halting problem; sometimes you want to spend time finding the exact thing you want, and sometimes you just want something that's good enough. Both problems don't need the same solution.

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