What the hell? Is riding public transport or riding a bike either a burdain or a privilidge? Is Driving a car?
I am trying to control shit in my home, it should be neither.
1: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/E...
I don't see why a voice assistant for the masses couldn't "train it's own users", for example suggesting the language it does expect. But even then, most times people are talking in noisy environments or talk to fast or don't have an understand of how the machine might work. Regardless, who cares. They ruin the audio environment of a home. They're good for setting timers while you're cooking, that's about it.
So maybe it's just that the subfield of natural language understanding is still too early to be really useful. Speech recognition itself has gotten really good but then understanding the context, the intent, etc, all that is natural language understanding, and that is often the problem.
Citation needed, there's a lot of disagreements and misunderstandings (some have cost lives) that could've been avoided if we didn't have 10 different ways to say the same vague thing that can be interpreted in 20 ways. You think the military uses a phonetic alphabet and specifically structured communications for fun? Or the way planes talk to ATC for example. Where precision and unambiguity is crucial natural language always gets ditched for something more formal.
I only use voice assistants to set alarms. I cannot imagine voice as a primary input. Then again, many have opted out of owning desktops and laptops in favor of mobile phones. That also seems terribly inefficient.
A lot of people don't need computers in the general purpose sense. I admit my mind boggles a bit when co-workers tell me their kids don't want a computer to do their school papers because their phone is fine. But, then, I'm used to keyboards and what we think of an a "computer" and have been using one for decades--and grab one when I can for any remotely complex or input-heavy task.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/20/21227741/apple-ipad-pro-m...
Suggests a keyboard and large tablet is heavier than a laptop
I actually do wish there were good Mac or Chromebook choices for a travel 11" or so laptop but the market seems to have settled on a thin 13" as the floor and, admittedly, the weight/size difference isn't huge.
In response to a grandparent comment about weight for tablets: I prefer Apple’s folio old style of cases/keyboards because of weight. I have one for both my small and large iPad Pros. Whenever I travel, I usually just take one of my iPads if I don’t need a dev environment [1].
[1] but with GitHub Codespaces and Google Colab, development on an iPad is sort of OK.
Might as well go for the laptop at that point given that it can actually do far more imo, unless you ditch the phone and go for one of those half phone half tablets I guess.
For reading, I'm probably bringing my Kindle along if I don't bring my tablet.
Back to work? Sit on table, one cable and it's back to a desktop and charging up again.
Makes the whole thing make far more sense.
The killer-tech will be when we have a tablet that is as light as phone.
I grew up in the 1980s, when handwritten papers were still the norm. I do see the advantages of using a word-processor for writing papers, but don't see why it would be a necessity (at least, until University).
Around when Android appeared, and the first voice searches began, Google suddenly started to alias everything.
Search for 'Andy', 'Andrew' appears. Search for 'there', and 'they're' appears.
This has been taken further, now silly aliases such as debian .. ubuntu exist, and as google happily drops words in your search, to find a match, this makes precision impossible.
But, that's the only way to make voice search remotely work, so...
If you have terms you don't want interpreted broadly you can put them in quotes.
I preached the Gospel of Google when the competition was composed of web rings and Altavista, but Google in its infinite wisdom has abandoned the advanced user with changes of this nature.
https://blog.google/products/search/how-were-improving-searc...
Maybe we don't have clear intentions in the first place, maybe languages are not just ambiguous, but only meant to narrow realms of valid interpretations down to a desired precision, rather than intended to form a logically fully constrained statements. Maybe this is why intelligent entities are needed to "correctly" interpret natural language statements, because an act of interpretation itself is a decision making and an action.
Just my thoughts but I do think there are more to be said than "natural languages are ambiguous".
On the other hand, legalese exists and is the lingua franca of telling people what to do, and math exists.
And that's why all of aviation has moved to a tight phraseology, such that delegated commands are universally understood and their meaning is set in stone.
Natural language has cost many lives.
Using language to instruct humans goes wrong all the time. Just a short while ago on British Bakeoff I saw 2 of the contestants make white chocolate feathering on their biscuits by making actual feathers out of white chocolate and placing them on their biscuits. And I'm sure that will confuse quite a few people reading this too. It certainly confuses image searches. Language is a fuzzy interface. Compare to interface like clicking on a button that does the thing I want done.
Not always resulting in unambiguous instructions:
"Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns." ~Lord Raglan, Balaclava
"I wish him to take Cemetery Hill if practicable." ~Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg
Every time we try to minimize errors, we formalize a language. I don't even think people use natural language to issue commands often. Commanding people is often considered rude.
I think this is really a characterization. Mostly human communication is full of errors and problems.
What is true is that when it is important enough, humans have come up with ways that minimize communication errors and frameworks to deal with ambiguity - mostly these involve training and effort though, it really doesn't come naturally.
- identify users by voice
- ask them clarifying questions
- remember the answers on a per-user basis
- understand "no, that was the wrong answer"
If you're going to provide a formal interface to the computer, you also have to provide teaching in that formal interface, which is far more of a burden to the user than the cost of the device. And we've completely moved away from that model (not necessarily a good thing, but that's what the market has chosen).
But I imagine there are significantly more who would appreciate clarifying requests by a teachable assistant capable of interacting with the entire digital world on their behalf, efficiently and intelligently.
I've said before, I would prefer a voice assistant that optimized for traversing its menu system, in response to unambiguous noises (could be high and low pitch hums or whatever) that lets me bypass the guessing game and use the menu it's hiding
That would be a fun universe.
[0] https://mw.lojban.org/index.php?title=Lojban&setlang=en-US
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Networking_Language
Hey Siri
Turn lights on 50 percent
For one hour
Dim over that time
Play music.
I can learn what I need to do; JUST LET ME KNOW THE MAGIC WORDS!
...I don't know how to do that
Alexa, turn lights on
...What do I turn the lights with?
Alexa, activate lights
...I don't know what you mean
...It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
ALEXA TURN ON THE DAMN LIGHTS
...I don't know the word "lights"
...Oh no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a grue!
** You have died **
Downstairs or upstairs bathroom?
Downstairs.
Sorry, I didn’t understand. Downstairs it upstairs bathroom?
Downstairs bathroom.
Sorry, I didn’t understand. Downstairs it upstairs bathroom?
Cancel.
Ok. Cancelling.
Siri turn on downstairs bathroom lights.
(Turns off all lights)
Because god help you if your device names are similar to your room names…
And I added scenes so I can say “Gondor calls for aid” and the beacons will light.
"hey siri?"
(no response, no icon),
"hey siri?"
(no response, no icon),
"hey siri?" (louder)
(no response, no icon),
"hey siri?" (louder and slower)
(no response, no icon),
reboot iphone 13 pro
"hey siri?"
works
I guess a list like language would be ideal and the pauses would be like parentheses
you great the prompt and add one or more actions to take.
Otherwise, it works great :-) We love the hands-off usage mode because we cook a lot, so adding things to shopping lists or looking stuff up doesn't require cleaning hands in the middle of prep. Also the speakers are pretty darn good for the size and work well for music.
Doing complicated things is right out though. But the simple stuff works fine.
It would be more error prone in a lot of ways, which is probably why nobody's done it yet, but it would also be a _lot_ more powerful, and fulfill the vision of conversational AI in a way the current rules-based assistants do not.
I think if powerful language models were easily accessible to normal people (in an inexpensive and completely unrestricted fashion, like with Stable Diffusion) we'd already see this happening in the open source world. Companies are going to be a lot more hesitant to try it though until they have a way to 100% prevent the models from making mistakes that could reflect poorly on the company, which is going to take _way_ longer to achieve.
Natural language is a fundamentally wrong vehicle to convey information to a computer. It can be useful for some specific tasks, automated Q/A, simple interfaces to databases, stuff where I can't be properly f_ed to remember the syntax or the shortcut like IDE commands.
But the idea it can replace formal language is fundamentally and dangerously incorrect. I agree with Dijkstra's quip, we shouldn't regard formal language as a burden, but rather as a privilege.