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I agree. What we have isn't on the level of Her's Samantha, but I think we have enough to make Siri et al. much more usable than it is now. Once this new vein of human-computer-interaction is struck, we'll start to see consistent progress and optimization to suit this domain. While ChatGPT is still shallow, it's much deeper than what we've had before and, crucially, it's way more conversational. There's a sense that, if I could just word something right, not in a technical way, but in English, I could get it to do what I want, and I don't have that sense with Siri at all (where I'm constantly thinking of keywords). We'll see.
BTW, that quote is from Lenin:
I do think voice support would be really fun to try with a version of chatgpt that's just a bit more interesting to talk to, with near-perfect voice-to-text accuracy. I'm not sure how far away we are from that, but I do feel like voice-to-text progress has stalled, you would have hoped we were there by now. And while chatGPT is amazing, its "Quora" mode, or you could call it "buzzkill" mode, where it really seems like it's just summarizing common denominator internet opinions is definitely a hurdle, and I don't think its just a result of PC-ification. I think a lot of it is just a result of processing a ton of text, rather than actually having a model of reality.
Beyond being interesting to talk to, getting it to do things is hopefully getting worked on, but I still think I'd take the bet that it either hits some fundamental consistency challenges a la self-driving cars, or just doesn't get widely adopted because it turns out people just don't like the mode of interaction a la VR.
If you think voice to text stalled, then you might not have heard of Whisper from OpenAI. It's miles ahead of the competition.
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The Bing phone app has this. It defaults to speech recognition for the prompts and TTS for the replies.
So I didn't realize that, I actually just downloaded it and tried a "brainstorming" session with it. There's some promise there, but it's interesting what specific ways it falls short of providing a natural conversation.
You have to press a button every time you want to talk
It will arbitrarily interrupt you and respond
Each conversation can only go 15 replies deep, presumably because of some technical limitation
The quality of its responses lean towards that "buzzkill" quality of repeating what you say and giving the most generic reply possible.
Input-wise, I think it would be really interesting to see a version of this where the microphone is always on, and the AI could try to interrupt you in your pauses, but if you kept talking it would shut up and keep listening. Just having that, with the existing tech (and removing the 15 reply limit) would be a pretty cool tool to possibly organize your thoughts in a way. But then if the AI was actually interesting to talk to in a conversational way, that would be pretty fascinating, and get quite a bit closer to the Her bar. So I'm definitely keeping an eye on it.
You may want to set the conversation mode to "more creative".
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