this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2025
377 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
76105 readers
2457 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Even if they solve the regional dialect problem, there's still the problem of people being really imprecise with natural language.
For example, I may ask, "what is the weather like?" I could mean:
An internet search would be "weather ". That's it. Typing that takes a few seconds, whereas voice control requires processing the message (a couple seconds usually) and probably an iteration or two to get what you want. Even if you get it right the first time, it's still as long or longer than just typing a query.
Even if voice activation is perfect, I'd still prefer a text interface.
My autistic brain really struggles with natural language and its context-based nuances. Human language just isn't built for precision, it's built for conciseness and efficacy. I don't see how a machine can do better than my brain.
Agreed. A lot of communication is non-verbal. Me saying something loudly could be due to other sounds in the environment, frustration/anger, or urgency. Distinguishing between those could include facial expressions, gestures with my hands/arms, or any number of non-verbal clues. Many autistic people have difficulty picking up on those cues, and machines are at best similar to the most extreme end of autism, so they tend to make rules like "elevated volume means frustration/anger" when that could very much not be the case.
Verbal communication is designed for human interactions, whether in long-form (conversations) or short-form (issuing commands), and they rely on a lot from the human experience. Human to computer interactions should focus on those strengths, not try to imitate human interaction, because it will always fail at some point. If I get driving instructions from my phone, I want it to be terse (turn right on Hudson Boulevard), whereas if my SO is giving me directions, I'm happy with something more long-form (at that light, turn right), because my SO knows how to communicate unambiguously to me whereas my phone does not.
So yeah, I'll probably always hate voice-activation, because it's just not how I prefer to communicate w/ a computer.