stop blindly listening to journalists and have some taste.
i have a UX maxim with a ton of evidence behind it that no one seems to talk about:
if a product you're releasing has worse ergonomics that what currently exists, it WON'T WORK. evidence:
1. the wii -> was a success itself but couldn't go to a next generation because having static controllers is more ergonomic than the waving around gimmick 2. the touchbar -> looking at the small screen is less ergonomic than muscle memory 3. butterfly keyboard 4. touch keyboards on laptops -> no muscle memory 5. stylus 6. VR (and especially the apple vision which is extremely heavy) 7. every voice agent device ever -> rabbit r1, humane pin, muse device and whatever openai has in mind won't work. voice is very limiting in a ton of situations where it would render the device useless. 8. car touchscreens for everything instead of physical buttons (we haven't gone past this yet) 9. 3d tvs
the list goes on.
the proof that this is a law of UX is that the opposite is also true:
1. agents are better than UIs -> having an agent that knows a ton about me, how i like to work and can connect to UIs that are inconsistent and buggy is fantastic and that's why everyone's using them. 2. automatic transmission (unless you're an enthusiast) 3. phone aspect ratios converging (remember early 2000 where all phones were completely different with zero interchangeability?) 4. mice > trackpad 5. airpods 6. keyless car entry 7. tab autocomplete 8. apple pay 9. rolling luggage
touch on a laptop is the most unergonomic thing someone could come up with. how is it easier to lift your arm from the resting position where the trackpad is to touch the same thing the trackpad could touch?
folding phones are a worse version of the ipad, much worse version of the mac, and much worse version of the regular iphone. people don't want to work on their phones.
There were just another company, doing a lot of good things, and also doing a lot of bad things. Most people were willingly ignoring the bad parts until now.
1. It’s low bandwidth. I can communicate so much more information so much more quickly, if I have access to higher bandwidth methods like video or direct file transfer. I can only speak so fast. I can only hear and comprehend so fast. I can type a lot faster than I can speak.
2. It has a relatively high error rate. Even amongst native speakers on both ends, it is common to have a misunderstanding because you didn’t hear the word(s) you thought you did. This is why the military spoken alphabet is so rigorous and difficult to confuse one letter from another.
3. It is functionally unidirectional. You can’t have two people talking to each other at the same time and have either of them understand the conversation. One person speaks, then stops. Then the other person speaks. Break this rule, and you get chaos and noise.
4. It is functionally a broadcast-only medium. You broadcast your voice to the other party (or parties). If they want to respond, they broadcast their response back to you. It is impossible to effectively share that medium with others who are in hearing range.
5. As a corollary, It’s very difficult to have a truly private conversation with someone unless you go to significant lengths to ensure that your respective broadcasts can’t be overheard by anyone else. Cue the “Cone of Silence” from “Get Smart”.
6. For voice to work at all, there has to be a high signal-to-noise ratio. The more background noise you have, the harder it is to make yourself understood, and the harder it is to understand the other party. So, everyone has to shout, thus causing even more background noise for any other parties nearby.
Yes, I understand that there may be times when no other option is available. I get that. But that doesn’t mean that I want to use voice as my primary method of communication, or even a secondary or tertiary method. Last ditch, maybe.
I do not, ever, never ever, want to speak to Siri or Alexa or any other voice assistant. It drives me nuts when I go down to visit with my in-laws and they are always screaming at Alexa, multiple times over because Alexa didn’t hear them or didn’t understand them.
Speaking to devices is a great foil to use on Star Trek. It lets you pretend to be talking to someone else to get something done, when in fact you’re really explaining to the audience watching at home. Outside of Star Trek, I am not at all convinced that voice is a good communication medium between two biological entities who are physically close to each other and are native speakers of the same language.
But it's terrible. It hates me. It can barely understand me. Voice Access has a supposedly restricted command set, but it literally tries to interpret all the words you speak at it. The most common command is "tap <label>" but it usually hears me saying "top" instead. And I can tell it to "tap 27" at least three times, sometimes five times, before it makes any sense out of what I said.
I mean, occasionally it goes without a fuss, but I find myself repeating commands so often, it's exasperating. And I'm just sitting alone on the balcony at night. It really takes some conscious enunciation to get the point across.
So no, Voice Access would never be my choice for routine device control. I would be tearing my hair out. Imagine the people around me in a waiting room, or on the bus. It would be a nightmare if more than one person was doing it, too!
Voice Access has no recognition or training on my unique voice or accent. When I've got it activated, anyone, everyone could control my device the same way. That's uncool.