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Comment by thih9

2 years ago

What about voice assistants? These are not as impressive when compared to LLMs, so perhaps wouldn't cause a UX shift on their own. But in essence Siri, Alexa, etc also seem to put the user's intent first.

I'd argue that voice assistants are somewhat part of the same paradigm[1], and ChatGPT etc focused on pure text input mostly to make the research easier. Voice assistants just focused on the challenges of understanding speech, facilitated by limited allowed grammar, while ChatGPT-style research focused on the challenges of understanding language, facilitated by limiting input to text. "Just" produce ChatGPT input tokens from a voice-to-text-with-extra-hints machine and you have them combined.

[1] Yes, voice assistants tend to be more command-oriented, but I view that as a limitation of the technology when they were popularized, not as an inherent part of the concept of a voice assistant. Voice is just an input modalism.

A voice assistant is simply a speech-driven conversational UI; they belong to the same class of UIs as chatGPT. In fact, you could very well power your voice assistant with GPT.