Comment by rsynnott
3 days ago
In fairness it wasn't _just_ him (or Microsoft); everyone was very, very excited about voice in the late 90s.
Meanwhile, today, almost 30 years after Dragon NaturallySpeaking (which was kind of in the ChatGPT role; it seemed so magic that everyone thought everything was about to change), voice recognition is finally just about good enough that it can be used for unimportant things. Though personally I still wouldn't trust it to control my computer.
Interesting thought experiment. I think accuracy is table stakes for a voice control system, I think the bigger challenge for adoption is discoverablility. It's hard to know what the exact syntax the voice prompt expects and everyone is different. I do wonder if LLMs and their ability to parse natural language will rapidly unlock that type of thing because they're a lot more flexible about how you command them