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Comment by brunoborges

1 month ago

> Nobody is voluntarily booking a flight with their Alexa.

Rich people use voice because they have disposable income and they don't care if a flight is $800 or $4,000. They are likely buying business/first class anyways.

Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights.

The average person doesn't have the privilege of using voice because it doesn't have enough fuck-you-money to not care for prices.

As someone who's friends with executive assistants: rich people use executive assistants (humans) because they are busy and/or value their time more than money and don't want to bother with the details. None of them are using voice assistants.

> Tony Stark certainly doesn't care. Elon Musk certainly uses voice to talk to his management team to book his flights.

Delegating to a human isn't the same as using a voice assistant, this should be obvious, unless you believe that managers are doing all the real work and every IC is a brainless minion. Maybe far in the future when there's AGI, but certainly not today.

> The average person doesn't have the privilege of using voice because it doesn't have enough fuck-you-money to not care for prices.

You can order crap off Amazon for the same price as you would through the website with your Alexa right now, but Amazon themselves have admitted approximately 0% of people actually do this which is why the entire division ended up a minor disaster. It's just a shitty interface in the same way that booking a flight through voice is a shitty interface.

  • > None of them are using voice assistants.

    Rich people will literally just talk to their executive assistants and just ask what they want. They may use phone calls, voice mails, emails, and text. But you'd be crazy to argue that they never use just voice with their IRL assistants.

    Your point is that voice is a terrible interface to get something done. My point is that some people have the privilege to use voice to get something done.

    Some companies are just trying to remove the human who is taking the voice command and replacing with AI.

    • You're completely missing the distinction between "using a human brain (by telling a person what to do)" [yes this includes via voice] and "using a machine via voice interface."