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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   36873 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Oh I have no doubt of that. Especially because of the user-hostile behavior I mentioned. These days it's hard to use the damn thing without it advertising some "feature" to you, in the form of saying "by the way, did you know you can blah blah blah?". And if that wasn't bad enough, they straight up put ads in the shopping list section of the app trying to get you to buy their food deals. It's pretty clear that they are trying desperately to get the sort of usage you state.

I admit to some enjoyment that the marketing bods at Amazon thought they were being stealthy and getting one over on people: "We'll sell it to them as a handy aide-memoire and chat buddy, and once they're dependent on it as their computer friend, they'll move right along to buying stuff from us as is the plan!"

People just used it as the aide-memoire and didn't turn over their bank accounts to Amazon. I like that.

advertising some "feature" to you, in the form of saying "by the way, did you know you can blah blah blah?".

This seems like an unavoidable consequence of the difficulty in making an unintelligent auditory interface into a discoverable interface. I glance up at my desktop right now and I can see a couple application menu buttons, one for an OS menu, a half dozen icons for various utilities, a half dozen launcher icons for common applications or searchs or such, a virtual desktop panel with a few other applications visible ... and none of that was obtrusive in the slightest. My eyes can glaze over the parts I don't need a thousand times without bothering me, but then if I actually need something I don't have to have an exact invocation memorized, I can open up a menu and skim down to look for it.

How do you do that with a voice assistant right now? If it was practically passing a Turing test then I could describe vague needs or it could anticipate needs accurately, but with modern not-quite-there-yet AI what's it supposed to do? My ears can't glaze over "did you know you can" the way my eyes can glaze over a menu item or an icon, but I need some sort of indication of a feature or I just don't know the feature exists.

(it also would be nice if it actually had the same basic features as my computers, at the same price; now that's a problem they should have been able to avoid...)

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