Depends what you are trying to do with a computer.

Natural language is a pretty brilliant way to interact with a computer if you want to learn a foreign language, but it’s probably not great if you are wanting to play a first person shooter game.

One thing is clear though: it’s not one size fits all.

The existing paradigm is temporary. AI will improve to infer more meaning from what users want, increase their ability to perform it, and chat systems will eventually switch to optional voice input. You tell the system what to do, and it'll perform whatever steps it needs to. I can't imagine anything more natural than that, for the everyday user.

I'm sure things will get more esoteric, for the experienced computer user.

Yes, being able to voice chat with AI is interesting, and we can already do that (e.g., using voice-to-text).

> AI will improve to infer more meaning from what users want

This is true. It already knows what it should do when I give it a piece of code and say "" (the bug emoji) or "spot the bug". If you give it the error code, it already knows it has to find a solution.

But for non-programming tasks, it'll be a challenge to infer what the user wants because language is vague and people are used to speaking ambiguously and clarifying only when the other person doesn't understand.

I don’t mean to be mean but this is an example of what bugs me about the AI hype cycle.

Person has a valid criticism, the answer is a vague, wishy washy “it’ll improve and be able to provide all things to all people in exactly the way they need it”

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that statement. What are the concrete steps from here to there? What’s the timeline?

There's nothing he says that isn't already here though. Bing, Bard all have voice input. and even the technology for more native speech abilities (so not just STT) is already here - https://google-research.github.io/seanet/audiopalm/examples/

They're already able to infer a great deal from context. They will improve simply because we've not hit any scaling walls yet.

Looking at the difference from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4, you can see these features are already appearing. GPT-4 can do more, understand more types of data, infer more context, and craft more advanced responses. With the right prompting, it can even ask clarifying questions to handle ambiguity. Most of the time when people talk about the limitations of AI, they're talking about limitations that are _very_ close to being improved upon. Context windows are a weakness, but they're growing, and memory features are being developed. Intelligence is improving. Understood data types are expanding. My guess is that GPT-5 (and equivalents) will understand voice natively, instead of needing a speech to text model in the middle.

There are absolutely serious limitations to existing AI, but the criticisms mentioned here aren't where we're stuck.

Yes, I agree it should be faster, 100ms between question and concise answers. With standard phrasing of needs and wants like Cucumber or Non-Violent Communication and a Dvorak keyboard layout or a shorthand input system (yash or bref) you can go a long way. For standard stuff you could always drop to short ruby like syntax

Counterpoint: Google’s search engine is pretty successful? This suggests that people can use a freeform text box as input.

Typing can be augmented with autocomplete. Some people like using a microphone, though.

I think when Bard reaches full integration with Google products and it is fully unleashed upon android phones with voice control, it will be a watershed moment.