The Uncanny Valley of Voice Recognition

An anonymous reader writes: We've often seen the term "uncanny valley" applied to the field of robotics — it's easy to get unsettled when robots act close to being human, yet fail completely in a few key ways. GitHub Engineer Zach Holman writes that we've now reached uncanny valley territory in speech recognition as well, though the results are more frustrating than they are disturbing. He says, "Part of this frustration is the user interface itself is less standardized than the desktop or mobile device UI you're used to. Even the basic terminology can feel pretty inconsistent if you're jumping back and forth between platforms.

Siri aims to be completely conversational: Do you think the freshman Congressman from California's Twelfth deserved to sit on HUAC, and how did that impact his future relationship with J. Edgar? Xbox One is basically an oral command line interface, of the form: Xbox (direct object). ...it's these inconsistencies that are frustrating as you jump back and forth between devices. And we're only going to scale this up."

Comments

I fail to see how it's any worse than other UIs

[msobkow]

I fail to see how the "inconsistency" of speech recognition UIs are any more earth-shattering that the inconsistency between graphical UIs. People learn to use what they have, no more, no less. Anyone who "expects" device Y to behave like device X when they're from different vendors is a fool.

Hell, even Android devices aren't consistent between vendors, and they start off with the same core code!

Re:I fail to see how it's any worse than other UIs

[Shadow of Eternity]

Exactly. The problem isn't frustration with different interface schemes, the problem is that they don't fucking work. I use several different programs with buttons and menus in different arrangements, but when I click a button the button is bloody well clicked regardless of where exactly it is. Voice recognition on the other hand is simply too unreliable.