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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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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.

  1. You have to press a button every time you want to talk

  2. It will arbitrarily interrupt you and respond

  3. Each conversation can only go 15 replies deep, presumably because of some technical limitation

  4. 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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