(2017-05-08) Ohno The Endgame Of The Voice UI, like That Of The Chat UI, Is The Command Line Interface

John Ohno: The end-game of the voice UI (like that of the chat UI (chatbot)) is the command line interface. So, it’s useful to take cues from currently-existing good CLI UX. (For instance, look at the differences between zsh & command.com, and the trends in the evolution of borne-compatible command shells since 1970.)

unix shells made big leaps in discoverability early: as of the GNU announcement in 1984, Stallman was already saying that any command shell should be expected to have auto-completion features, and online documentation systems like man & apropos already existed (soon to be joined with the hypertext system info)

No virtual assistant (Intelligent Software Assistant) I am aware of will list available functions or list the set of invocations they accept — in other words, there is no help system comparable to man or apropos — and since error reporting is nearly nonexistent, this means interacting with unfamiliar features is the equivalent of playing a classic text adventure game.

The second big factor is that, if we want to do real work with these interfaces, we need to reduce the amount of fuzzy matching and move toward a system in which every word is expected to be meaningful. Picking one or two key words out of a sentence will give few false positives when performing simple tasks, but cannot scale

Mode indication is a problem in speech interfaces that have complex behaviors. We expect a great deal of stacked context, and even today’s systems, which are capable of doing next to nothing, tend to fail miserably at consistently keeping track of stacked context or falling in and out of different modes predictably

If we want speech-controlled virtual assistants to graduate from toy to tool, we can’t allow ourselves to be seduced by flashy but ultimately hollow flat-pack futurism, and must instead admit that this tech will be inappropriate in most situations