On the other side, humans have been fine using natural language to delegate commands to each other.
So maybe it's just that the subfield of natural language understanding is still too early to be really useful. Speech recognition itself has gotten really good but then understanding the context, the intent, etc, all that is natural language understanding, and that is often the problem.
Citation needed, there's a lot of disagreements and misunderstandings (some have cost lives) that could've been avoided if we didn't have 10 different ways to say the same vague thing that can be interpreted in 20 ways. You think the military uses a phonetic alphabet and specifically structured communications for fun? Or the way planes talk to ATC for example. Where precision and unambiguity is crucial, natural language always gets ditched for something more formal.
This is actually an interesting point. In the Army, we used terms that limited ambiguity thereby increasing efficiency. Even if one eliminates the complexity of language, there's still a specification problem.
I only use voice assistants to set alarms. I cannot imagine voice as a primary input. Then again, many have opted out of owning desktops and laptops in favor of mobile phones. That also seems terribly inefficient.
>Then again, many have opted out of owning desktops and laptops in favor of mobile phones. That also seems terribly inefficient
A lot of people don't need computers in the general purpose sense. I admit my mind boggles a bit when co-workers tell me their kids don't want a computer to do their school papers because their phone is fine. But, then, I'm used to keyboards and what we think of as a "computer" and have been using one for decades--and grab one when I can for any remotely complex or input-heavy task.
> A lot of people don't need computers in the general purpose sense. I admit my mind boggles a bit when co-workers tell me their kids don't want a computer to do their school papers because their phone is fine.
I grew up in the 1980s, when handwritten papers were still the norm. I do see the advantages of using a word-processor for writing papers, but don't see why it would be a necessity (at least, until University).
It sounds ridiculous, but I'll admit that when you've got something like Dex that lets you dock the phone for usb and hdmi out and gives you close to a full desktop OS I'd imagine it really is enough for the casual user.
I certainly know colleagues in the industry who travel with just a tablet and external keyboard. No, they're not running IDEs etc., but they find it OK for emails, editing docs, taking notes, etc. Personally I'll spend the extra few pounds to also carry along a laptop. But I can imagine not needing/wanting a dedicated laptop when I travel at some point.
I'm usually carrying a tablet anyway though for entertainment/reading purposes. So it's usually a choice of tablet + laptop vs. tablet + keyboard. (I admittedly don't really have a weight optimized travel laptop these days either.)
I actually do wish there were good Mac or Chromebook choices for a travel 11" or so laptop but the market seems to have settled on a thin 13" as the floor and, admittedly, the weight/size difference isn't huge.
While I am mostly a Mac person, for travel I often prefer a tiny and cheap Lenovo Chromebook that does everything (a bit poorly): Linux containers for light weight programming and writing, consume media like books, audiobooks, and streaming.
In response to a grandparent comment about weight for tablets: I prefer Apple’s folio old style of cases/keyboards because of weight. I have one for both my small and large iPad Pros. Whenever I travel, I usually just take one of my iPads if I don’t need a dev environment [1].
[1] but with GitHub Codespaces and Google Colab, development on an iPad is sort of OK.
I still don't see the point of tablets. It's just a smartphone with a larger screen, and practically all people already carry phones.
Might as well go for the laptop at that point given that it can actually do far more imo, unless you ditch the phone and go for one of those half phone half tablets I guess.
I'd rather watch movies, read, play certain games, etc. on my tablet than on a phone. (Obviously there are also specific use cases like digital art.) That said, I mostly use my tablet when traveling and it's a distant third in necessity compared to either a laptop or a phone--and only somewhat more useful than a smartwatch.
Watching movies on a tablet is terrible, though. All methods for propping the device up so you can watch the movie are inferior to the way a laptop screen props itself up via hinges and a base.
On a plane I'd rather use the tablet in my lap than have to put the tray table down. And in a hotel room I'm watching on the couch if there is one. (I do also have an attachment for my tablet that will let you prop it up on a table but I mostly don't use it because it adds weight.)
For reading, I'm probably bringing my Kindle along if I don't bring my tablet.
If you do not have one, buy a dock! I have a sp6 and 4 , and having the dock makes it quite the device. Speakers, multiple external monitors, keyboard, mouse -- a full desktop setup, I can grab and either stick a keyboard cover on or just use as a reading device on the couch.
Back to work? Sit on table, one cable and it's back to a desktop and charging up again.
How old are you? Because larger screens become really nice as your eyes go bad. And I don't need the full size of a laptop for things I'd want to do on a tablet.
The obsession with being lighter definitely has diminishing returns. At some point another few ounces doesn't make any difference in a real, practical sense. I think have just started to associate "lightness" == "better" despite there being no actual benefit past a certain threshold.
Right at some point. But at the current point my tablet is too heavy to hold in hand for more than 20 secs perhaps. Phone is ok. Tablet is not (for me). I only use tablet by placing it on table or a stand. Then actually using a laptop is much better than a table.
The killer-tech will be when we have a tablet that is as light as phone.
Thanks for that. A lot of energy is currently sunk because of natural language, and I'd argue gains from employing software (instead of human processes) for various tasks is in part due to scaling up the results of many confusing discussions in natural language about what a specific process actually comprises.
This is part of the reason Google search sucks more and more.
Around when Android appeared, and the first voice searches began, Google suddenly started to alias everything.
Search for 'Andy', 'Andrew' appears. Search for 'there', and 'they're' appears.
This has been taken further, now silly aliases such as debian .. ubuntu exist, and as google happily drops words in your search, to find a match, this makes precision impossible.
But, that's the only way to make voice search remotely work, so...
I don't think this is to support voice search: Google generally knows whether a query was initiated by voice or typing. Instead, I think it's because most users find what they're looking for faster with it.
If you have terms you don't want interpreted broadly you can put them in quotes.
Google "helpfully" ignores the quotes sometimes too. They're not the hard and fast rule they used to be.
I preached the Gospel of Google when the competition was composed of web rings and Altavista, but Google in its infinite wisdom has abandoned the advanced user with changes of this nature.
I find voice-assistant often useful for using the phone such as opening a given setting, say make the display brighter. Trying to navigate the settings pages is very error-prone. There seems to be no universal standard as to where each setting should be found.
There is a widely accepted and straightforward thinking that humans has ideas, which are expressed in languages, and that languages being ambiguous is problematic: this I'm starting to have doubts on.
Maybe we don't have clear intentions in the first place, maybe languages are not just ambiguous, but only meant to narrow realms of valid interpretations down to a desired precision, rather than intended to form a logically fully constrained statements. Maybe this is why intelligent entities are needed to "correctly" interpret natural language statements, because an act of interpretation itself is a decision making and an action.
Just my thoughts but I do think there are more to be said than "natural languages are ambiguous".
> On the other side, humans have been fine using natural language to delegate commands to each other.
Using language to instruct humans goes wrong all the time. Just a short while ago on British Bakeoff I saw 2 of the contestants make white chocolate feathering on their biscuits by making actual feathers out of white chocolate and placing them on their biscuits. And I'm sure that will confuse quite a few people reading this too. It certainly confuses image searches. Language is a fuzzy interface. Compare to interface like clicking on a button that does the thing I want done.
How would you (easily) describe the concept of chocolate feathering to a computer without using natural language? (e.g. if you wanted the computer to generate an image, or search for an image of / recipe with chocolate feathering).
> On the other side, humans have been fine using natural language to delegate commands to each other.
And that's why all of aviation has moved to a tight phraseology, such that delegated commands are universally understood and their meaning is set in stone.
> humans have been fine using natural language to delegate commands to each other.
Not always resulting in unambiguous instructions:
"Lord Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy carrying away the guns."
~Lord Raglan, Balaclava
"I wish him to take Cemetery Hill if practicable."
~Robert E. Lee, Gettysburg
> On the other side, humans have been fine using natural language to delegate commands to each other.
I think this is really a characterization. Mostly human communication is full of errors and problems.
What is true is that when it is important enough, humans have come up with ways that minimize communication errors and frameworks to deal with ambiguity - mostly these involve training and effort though, it really doesn't come naturally.
> humans have been fine using natural language to delegate commands to each other.
Every time we try to minimize errors, we formalize a language. I don't even think people use natural language to issue commands often. Commanding people is often considered rude.
So maybe it's just that the subfield of natural language understanding is still too early to be really useful. Speech recognition itself has gotten really good but then understanding the context, the intent, etc, all that is natural language understanding, and that is often the problem.