Why would anybody buy GM? Seems to me from this side of the Atlantic that that company's lucky to still be in business at all, and is pissing away money at a phenomenal rate due to a killer combination of huge operational costs, shit products, and consumer tastes shifting-away from the stone-age pick-up trucks and over to the sort of small, economical cars they've been failing to make any profit out of in Europe for I don't know how long.
The only reason I could see for buying GM would be if they get bought out by Renault/Nissan, as was the talk not long ago.
If it just doesn't allow you to type in strings of numbers as well as say them, then it's an extremely bad design, and I'd be surprised if there's too many systems out there that are like that. For instance, who in their right minds would read out their credit card details in public? You need to be able to type stuff like that in.
Well, when it's a choice between an underpaid, uninterested dumbass human, and a well-designed, efficient machine, I'll go artificial every time.
Of course it's going to dissuade you from speaking to a human - that's expensive. Thing is, if the machine does the job you need it to do, why not just go with it? Fine, if you've tried and failed with it, go to an operator by all means, but give the thing a chance, you might find it does the trick.
Does that thing REALLY take all that information off you and THEN suggest that if this is an emergency call, you've just wasted several vitally important minutes?
Of course you can weight them - you can start by favouring the most common names. Plus, you'd be surprised how good modern recognisers are at dealing with large grammars (i.e. sets of acceptable utterances). But the real trick is to ask the right questions in the right order and progressively narrow down the size of the search space.
For instance, one system I worked on took hotel bookings by credit card. To do this, you need to take the name and address of the cardholder. As you rightly point out, asking someone their name and searching through the set of all names is relatively difficult. A much more sensible approach is to take their postcode and get back an n-best list of possible matches for that. You then take them through collecting the rest of their address, narrowing down the list of possibilities until eventually you arrive at just one. This should provide a list of names at that address, and so instead of trying to recognise a name from tens of thousands, you've got it down to just a few possibilities, and all without asking any more questions than you would have had to ask anyway - you just changed their ordering to make them more effective.
Incidentally, some of these systems have easter eggs in 'em. Orange's sadly departed Wildfire answerphone service here in the UK had a couple of beauties - saying "what does a cow do?" would cause the very prim-and-proper lady on the other end to go "MOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
You shouldn't have to pause between numbers, or modify your speech in any way, in fact. It's a common mistake that people make when confronted with a speech recognition system to speak more slowly and clearly. Actually, this just confuses the recogniser, which has been trained up on unimaginably huge corpora of everyday speech. Of course, the problem with this is that people then get even more annoyed at how the system doesn't seem to understand them no matter how hard they try, when actually the right thing to do would be to stop trying so hard!
Some more well-designed systems, if you're getting absolutely nowhere, will suggest to you that you should just speak in your normal voice. Often people take the hint and get on just fine after this helpful hint. Unfortunately there's always a few poor souls who just can't make themselves understood (or just won't do as they're told).
Of course, if you find it works better if you pause between numbers, carry on, all that matters is that you get out of it what you need to. But I just know it shouldn't, really.
Tell you what, you try booking a seat on a train by pressing buttons on your phone keypad, then feel free to come back to me if you still can't see the advantage of speech recognition...
Seriously, though, the reasons are simple. Firstly, it's a more natural mode of interaction and , secondly it allows you to do more. Of course, all this is based on the assumption that the underlying technology, and the user interface, are up to the job, because if they aren't, you're in for a bad experience.
But if you're standing under an airport flightpath in a force ten gale and the thing's having a bit of trouble understanding you, throw it a bit of slack - it's hard. Look on the bright side - in the vast majority of cases, it's making life easier for people because they don't have to remember which arbitrarily-chosen numbers correspond to which menu options, none of which seem to relate to their query in any way. And of course, pressing buttons on your phone while you're, say, driving your car, is Very Naughty...
Just listen to the instructions and follow them, man. Give the thing a chance and play fair. I know a lot of people feel like if they don't have their call dealt with by a human being, they're being fobbed off by whoever they're calling, but y'know, sometimes these systems do their job really efficiently if you just co-operate instead of going in with the attitude that it's not going to work and consequently giving it nothing to work with.
Of course, if the person who's designed the system has made it in such a way that you can't work out what it's asking of you, then they're an idiot and you're within your rights to get irritated at it.
You're what's known in the trade as a "goat". There's some people that, for reasons we don't really understand, just can't make themselves understood, and it looks like you're one of them. Sorry!
(Ironically enough, I'm a bit of a goat myself, and I design these bloody systems for a living - makes testing endlessly hilarious, I can tell you)
It's not "advanced", exactly, just well-designed. It follows good voice UI design practice and the user rarely hits difficulties because it's designed to anticipate and cope with them. There's stuff out there that's more technologically clever than Amtrak's system, but there's not too many that just Get The Job Done as well.
Now, hold on. As far as I know every Office document contains its undo history by default. Which would be great if you could actually make use of these undos after you've closed and reopened the document, but you can't - it only lets you undo what you've done in the current session. So why's it there at all? That's junk, by my reckoning.
Yes, it does need a complete overhaul. It's absolutely terrible. It's hugely cluttered and disorganised (and no, being able to move stuff where you want doesn't make up for that). Menus have had things added to them higgledy-piggledy over the years, so that often the location of a function makes little sense and just has to be learned - we've all spent minutes hunting for a function we know it has, only to find it's somewhere completely illogical, haven't we?
Also, the default configuration moves stuff around and takes stuff away of its own accord, and this is possibly the stupidest thing you can do in a UI. If you're hiding buttons because there would be too many on the screen at once otherwise, you should be thinking about how to organise things more efficiently and cut down on the number of buttons required, rather than just getting rid of stuff when you feel like it.
I don't blame you for wanting stuff to be the way it was in previous versions, because Microsoft seriously dropped the ball with the UI in the last version of Office. It's a total nightmarish mess of a thing.
The new UI is much better. Being used to the old way is no excuse to stick with an out-of-date design. Don't worry, you'll soon get used to it.
You've never seen it smoke? Next time you're on the freeway, drop it into third and overtake, and watch for that big black puff out the back. It's only for a fraction of a second, but it'll smoke all right.
Except that Kid A was, and still is, their biggest-selling album.
In fact, that whole album broke every rule in the record industry's book. Someone who'd know about these things once told me that they were given a huge advance fee and all the time they wanted to record the album, and none of the money was recoupable. This is in complete contrast to how the major labels normally do things, with artists often needing to sell an awful lot of albums before they see any money from them due to the record company taking the costs of everything from their videos to the flowers in the recording studio reception out of their wages.
I realise these sort of discussions usually descend into silly point-scoring over who knows more, and I assure you that's not my intention, but you should check out the triple album (yes!) "Soothing Sounds For Baby" by Raymond Scott. Each record's intended to be played to babies of different age groups to help them sleep, and it's all repetitive patterns of gentle sounds. I'm sure you'd agree that it's pretty much what later became known as ambient music, and it was made in 1963, a hell of a long time before Eno was at it.
Neither plasma nor LCD are good enough to persuade me to part with my cash. Why should I pay about twice as much as I would for a CRT when the quality's not as good? Plasma's got the burn-in problem, and the power consumption's colossal. LCD screens can't do proper black. Neither cope well with anything but their native resolution, and both completely fall to pieces when there's any kind of fast action on the screen.
The way I see it, they're both stopgap technologies that are persuading impatient people to part with their cash until they can iron the creases out of SED or OLED technology and get them production-ready.
But unfortunately I work in the speech industry, and it's hard enough selling stuff at the best of times, without these idiots pitching up and convincing a watching world that this is the state of the art...
Most of us have got brains to think and mouths to speak, and yet virtually everybody spends their days having inane conversations rather than preaching their insights to vast audiences. It's all they're capable of. Genuinely original, creative, interesting people are very rare - most of us are happy to pass the time of day adding nothing to anything.
Just because they're given a blank piece of paper and a way to show it to the world, why do you expect them all to become creative geniuses? They have neither the ability nor the inclination.
As some wiseass said a long time ago, "the great thing about the Internet is that anybody can publish. The worst thing about the Internet is that anybody can publish".
That's completely untrue. There's some extremely good text-to-speech engines out there - Loquendo spring to mind - it's just that what Microsoft builds into Windows is nowhere near the state of the art, and that's what most people are exposed to. Have a play with the demos on the above link. If you speak Spanish or Italian, you'll be particularly impressed with their products for those languages.
People look down on cyclists simply for being cyclists in America (I'm assuming from the fahrenheit temperatures you're American)? Really? Wow. Over here on the other side of the pond cyclists and drivers get on each other's nerves because each thinks the other are inconsiderate users of the road, but nobody thinks you're an oddball for getting on your bike. In London, I'd say most people would think you were more odd for wanting do drive through the centre of town, what with the congestion charge and the clogged streets and the comprehensive public transport system that'll happily take the strain for you (for a far-too-high price, but that's another rant).
Just out of interest, how much provision is there in the average city over there for cycle lanes and so on? I can remember seeing them now and again, but it seems to be a long way behind the UK (which, in turn, is a long, long way behind the likes of Denmark and the Netherlands).
Kicking the car habit's going to be a long, hard struggle for you people, and not just because you build sprawling cities and roads with no footpaths. Keep fighting the good fight.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine my disappointment on seeing "Roland Piquepaille" and "Life inside a cell", and getting this instead of the prison diaries I so hoped for...
Yeah, yeah, offtopic, I know.
Why would anybody buy GM? Seems to me from this side of the Atlantic that that company's lucky to still be in business at all, and is pissing away money at a phenomenal rate due to a killer combination of huge operational costs, shit products, and consumer tastes shifting-away from the stone-age pick-up trucks and over to the sort of small, economical cars they've been failing to make any profit out of in Europe for I don't know how long.
The only reason I could see for buying GM would be if they get bought out by Renault/Nissan, as was the talk not long ago.
If it just doesn't allow you to type in strings of numbers as well as say them, then it's an extremely bad design, and I'd be surprised if there's too many systems out there that are like that. For instance, who in their right minds would read out their credit card details in public? You need to be able to type stuff like that in.
Well, when it's a choice between an underpaid, uninterested dumbass human, and a well-designed, efficient machine, I'll go artificial every time.
Of course it's going to dissuade you from speaking to a human - that's expensive. Thing is, if the machine does the job you need it to do, why not just go with it? Fine, if you've tried and failed with it, go to an operator by all means, but give the thing a chance, you might find it does the trick.
Does that thing REALLY take all that information off you and THEN suggest that if this is an emergency call, you've just wasted several vitally important minutes?
That's jaw-droppingly bad design.
Of course you can weight them - you can start by favouring the most common names. Plus, you'd be surprised how good modern recognisers are at dealing with large grammars (i.e. sets of acceptable utterances). But the real trick is to ask the right questions in the right order and progressively narrow down the size of the search space.
For instance, one system I worked on took hotel bookings by credit card. To do this, you need to take the name and address of the cardholder. As you rightly point out, asking someone their name and searching through the set of all names is relatively difficult. A much more sensible approach is to take their postcode and get back an n-best list of possible matches for that. You then take them through collecting the rest of their address, narrowing down the list of possibilities until eventually you arrive at just one. This should provide a list of names at that address, and so instead of trying to recognise a name from tens of thousands, you've got it down to just a few possibilities, and all without asking any more questions than you would have had to ask anyway - you just changed their ordering to make them more effective.
Neat.
Incidentally, some of these systems have easter eggs in 'em. Orange's sadly departed Wildfire answerphone service here in the UK had a couple of beauties - saying "what does a cow do?" would cause the very prim-and-proper lady on the other end to go "MOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"
You shouldn't have to pause between numbers, or modify your speech in any way, in fact. It's a common mistake that people make when confronted with a speech recognition system to speak more slowly and clearly. Actually, this just confuses the recogniser, which has been trained up on unimaginably huge corpora of everyday speech. Of course, the problem with this is that people then get even more annoyed at how the system doesn't seem to understand them no matter how hard they try, when actually the right thing to do would be to stop trying so hard!
Some more well-designed systems, if you're getting absolutely nowhere, will suggest to you that you should just speak in your normal voice. Often people take the hint and get on just fine after this helpful hint. Unfortunately there's always a few poor souls who just can't make themselves understood (or just won't do as they're told).
Of course, if you find it works better if you pause between numbers, carry on, all that matters is that you get out of it what you need to. But I just know it shouldn't, really.
Tell you what, you try booking a seat on a train by pressing buttons on your phone keypad, then feel free to come back to me if you still can't see the advantage of speech recognition...
Seriously, though, the reasons are simple. Firstly, it's a more natural mode of interaction and , secondly it allows you to do more. Of course, all this is based on the assumption that the underlying technology, and the user interface, are up to the job, because if they aren't, you're in for a bad experience.
But if you're standing under an airport flightpath in a force ten gale and the thing's having a bit of trouble understanding you, throw it a bit of slack - it's hard. Look on the bright side - in the vast majority of cases, it's making life easier for people because they don't have to remember which arbitrarily-chosen numbers correspond to which menu options, none of which seem to relate to their query in any way. And of course, pressing buttons on your phone while you're, say, driving your car, is Very Naughty...
Just listen to the instructions and follow them, man. Give the thing a chance and play fair. I know a lot of people feel like if they don't have their call dealt with by a human being, they're being fobbed off by whoever they're calling, but y'know, sometimes these systems do their job really efficiently if you just co-operate instead of going in with the attitude that it's not going to work and consequently giving it nothing to work with.
Of course, if the person who's designed the system has made it in such a way that you can't work out what it's asking of you, then they're an idiot and you're within your rights to get irritated at it.
You're what's known in the trade as a "goat". There's some people that, for reasons we don't really understand, just can't make themselves understood, and it looks like you're one of them. Sorry!
(Ironically enough, I'm a bit of a goat myself, and I design these bloody systems for a living - makes testing endlessly hilarious, I can tell you)
It's not "advanced", exactly, just well-designed. It follows good voice UI design practice and the user rarely hits difficulties because it's designed to anticipate and cope with them. There's stuff out there that's more technologically clever than Amtrak's system, but there's not too many that just Get The Job Done as well.
(By the way, I worked on the design a tiny bit)
Now, hold on. As far as I know every Office document contains its undo history by default. Which would be great if you could actually make use of these undos after you've closed and reopened the document, but you can't - it only lets you undo what you've done in the current session. So why's it there at all? That's junk, by my reckoning.
Yes, it does need a complete overhaul. It's absolutely terrible. It's hugely cluttered and disorganised (and no, being able to move stuff where you want doesn't make up for that). Menus have had things added to them higgledy-piggledy over the years, so that often the location of a function makes little sense and just has to be learned - we've all spent minutes hunting for a function we know it has, only to find it's somewhere completely illogical, haven't we?
Also, the default configuration moves stuff around and takes stuff away of its own accord, and this is possibly the stupidest thing you can do in a UI. If you're hiding buttons because there would be too many on the screen at once otherwise, you should be thinking about how to organise things more efficiently and cut down on the number of buttons required, rather than just getting rid of stuff when you feel like it.
I don't blame you for wanting stuff to be the way it was in previous versions, because Microsoft seriously dropped the ball with the UI in the last version of Office. It's a total nightmarish mess of a thing.
The new UI is much better. Being used to the old way is no excuse to stick with an out-of-date design. Don't worry, you'll soon get used to it.
You've never seen it smoke? Next time you're on the freeway, drop it into third and overtake, and watch for that big black puff out the back. It's only for a fraction of a second, but it'll smoke all right.
No flies on you, eh?
Except that Kid A was, and still is, their biggest-selling album.
In fact, that whole album broke every rule in the record industry's book. Someone who'd know about these things once told me that they were given a huge advance fee and all the time they wanted to record the album, and none of the money was recoupable. This is in complete contrast to how the major labels normally do things, with artists often needing to sell an awful lot of albums before they see any money from them due to the record company taking the costs of everything from their videos to the flowers in the recording studio reception out of their wages.
I realise these sort of discussions usually descend into silly point-scoring over who knows more, and I assure you that's not my intention, but you should check out the triple album (yes!) "Soothing Sounds For Baby" by Raymond Scott. Each record's intended to be played to babies of different age groups to help them sleep, and it's all repetitive patterns of gentle sounds. I'm sure you'd agree that it's pretty much what later became known as ambient music, and it was made in 1963, a hell of a long time before Eno was at it.
Go dig out a copy, it's an interesting listen.
Neither plasma nor LCD are good enough to persuade me to part with my cash. Why should I pay about twice as much as I would for a CRT when the quality's not as good? Plasma's got the burn-in problem, and the power consumption's colossal. LCD screens can't do proper black. Neither cope well with anything but their native resolution, and both completely fall to pieces when there's any kind of fast action on the screen.
The way I see it, they're both stopgap technologies that are persuading impatient people to part with their cash until they can iron the creases out of SED or OLED technology and get them production-ready.
Just wait till you discover Amarok and K3B, both of which are simply the best applications of their type available, bar none.
But unfortunately I work in the speech industry, and it's hard enough selling stuff at the best of times, without these idiots pitching up and convincing a watching world that this is the state of the art...
But that's what people DO.
Most of us have got brains to think and mouths to speak, and yet virtually everybody spends their days having inane conversations rather than preaching their insights to vast audiences. It's all they're capable of. Genuinely original, creative, interesting people are very rare - most of us are happy to pass the time of day adding nothing to anything.
Just because they're given a blank piece of paper and a way to show it to the world, why do you expect them all to become creative geniuses? They have neither the ability nor the inclination.
As some wiseass said a long time ago, "the great thing about the Internet is that anybody can publish. The worst thing about the Internet is that anybody can publish".
That's completely untrue. There's some extremely good text-to-speech engines out there - Loquendo spring to mind - it's just that what Microsoft builds into Windows is nowhere near the state of the art, and that's what most people are exposed to. Have a play with the demos on the above link. If you speak Spanish or Italian, you'll be particularly impressed with their products for those languages.
People look down on cyclists simply for being cyclists in America (I'm assuming from the fahrenheit temperatures you're American)? Really? Wow. Over here on the other side of the pond cyclists and drivers get on each other's nerves because each thinks the other are inconsiderate users of the road, but nobody thinks you're an oddball for getting on your bike. In London, I'd say most people would think you were more odd for wanting do drive through the centre of town, what with the congestion charge and the clogged streets and the comprehensive public transport system that'll happily take the strain for you (for a far-too-high price, but that's another rant).
Just out of interest, how much provision is there in the average city over there for cycle lanes and so on? I can remember seeing them now and again, but it seems to be a long way behind the UK (which, in turn, is a long, long way behind the likes of Denmark and the Netherlands).
Kicking the car habit's going to be a long, hard struggle for you people, and not just because you build sprawling cities and roads with no footpaths. Keep fighting the good fight.
On mine it's a bog-standard qwerty laid out in the normal fashion.