[stdgy]

Not sure I agree on the core problems.

The core problem is that these systems are just so incorrect in fundamental ways that they're effectively useless.

Imagine a buddy of yours tells you about an event he's pretty sure you'll be interested in. Why does he tell you about this event? Well, he knows your interests, what kind of things you enjoy, when you're free, who you might want to go to the event with, how much money you're willing to spend, how far you're willing to travel, when you like to go out... So when you're on the receiving end of such a suggestion it often feels great! It's like you've struck gold.

Now imagine your average 'AI' powered recommendation engine reading you a list of events. It doesn't feel magical. It doesn't even feel like it knows what the hell you enjoy doing half the time. Forget about knowing about your free time, budgetary restrictions, family restrictions, who you'd be able to go with; None of that stuff is even sort of in the picture. And it's all delivered to you in a voice that sounds like it would be as happy to kill you as give you advice. There's no lively back and forth on the logistics of the event. No feeling of discovery as you two talk it out, honing the plan that brings it from an abstract concept to reality.

It's just dead and lifeless and shitty.

[jrussino]

I agree with you, and I cringed a little when I read the following from the OP:

> There are some fundamental reasons why conversational 3rd party platforms are hard.

In my mind the big fundamental problem here is the "3rd party". I'd love to have an "AI assistant" or an "AI buddy" that could watch everything I do and say and write and really get to know me super well... as long as I can be confident that I own and control everything it observes and learns. I sure as hell don't want a 3rd party involved! But alas, I don't see a way we get there that doesn't involve Amazon or Meta or Google or OpenAI sitting between me and my "AI" tools, at least in the short run.

[foolofat00k]

Fwiw this is what I assume apple's long-term ai strategy is.

Let the hype-funded unicorns fight to develop (& end up commodifying) the tech and then design/sell selling devices that can support it locally. In that world, the AI assistant that you buy is a discrete piece of hardware, rather than a software treadmill.

Of course, this could mean that you end up on a hardware treadmill, but I think that's probably less bad, granted we can do something about the e-waste.

[zdragnar]

You're comparing a person recommending a single event versus an AI providing a list. In other words, proving OP's point.

GUIs provide information in 2D, letting eyes skim and bypass information that's not useful.

VUIs provide information in 1D, forcing you to take information in a linear stream and providing weak at best controls for skipping around without losing context or place.

Not coincidentally, this is why I absolutely hate watching videos for programming and news. If it's an article or post or thread, I can quickly evaluate if it has what I want and bypass the fluff. Videos simply suck at being usable, unless it's for something physical like how to work on a particular motor or carve a particular pattern into wood.

[Closi]

The person you are replying to is arguing the opposite - a future VUI could know your interests and just read you out the one relevant event rather than reading a list.

Alternatively it could summarise into “there’s a standup comedy gig, a few bands and various classes - what sort of thing are you looking for?” and then discuss with you to find the 2-3 events that are most relevant rather than reel off one big list.

[stdgy]

The point I'm trying to make is that this thing we're calling a 'VUI' is shit. There's no reason speech has to be this boring one dimensional thing. It's like the people that designed these things have never had a real conversation in their lives. When you're speaking with another person, or multiple other people, you're constantly exchanging cues that allow the other person to understand and re-calibrate what they're saying. These are verbal sounds, non-verbal sounds and physical movements. A crinkle of the forehead, a shake of the head, an uttered 'aaaaah' or a quiet verbal affirmation in support of what's being stated. It's not a single uni-directional stream of information, it's a multi-directional stream coming from multiple multi-modal sources at the same time.

None of these basic realities are accounted for in current technology. Instead we have these dumb robot voices reading us results from a preprocessed script that it thinks answers our question. No wonder the monkey part of our brain immediately picks up on the fact that this whole facade isn't just a lie, but an excruciating lie. It's excruciating because it's immediately obvious that there's nothing else 'there' to interact with. Even when speaking to another person over the phone, there's a huge amount of nuance you can pick up on. Are they happy? Are they sad? Are they frazzled? Are they in a rush? Are they relaxed? And you automatically calibrate your responses and what you say in the conversation based on all of these perfectly obvious things. Normal humans automatically calibrate what they say, how they sound, what they suggest based on these cues. It works really well!

There's no reason voice stuff has to suck. It has worked pretty great for humans for thousands of years. We're evolutionarily tuned to it. It's just that all the technology we've created around it totally sucks and people are delusional if they think it's anywhere near prime time.

[skeledrew]

This is all technically possible, but then there's also the privacy/security aspect. Many who would actually be into a solution like this won't be too hot to share the necessary information in the first place. And with good reason: companies with the resources to provide a decent experience don't have the best track record of protecting user data, and ensuring only the user has control of it. The privacy conscious would rather self-host, and end up losing out on capabilities in the process. So it's a sort of catch-22.

[frogmanalien]

Part of the big challenge here in my mind is that companies are reluctant to put data into the world for others to consume in a friendly way - if, say, event organisers, put data out as open-API's, there would be the opportunity for a self-hosted or "convenient" third party (ala Google, Amazon) to create conversational experiences on top of it - private user and privacy uninterested user is well served (as is "event seller" as it's exposed to more people). But, as long as we're stuck with systems having to pull data by web scraping, no one can build a good solution that could work for either scenario.

[jakderrida]

> Now imagine your average 'AI' powered recommendation engine reading you a list of events.

I think the issue is that having AI just fetch information catered towards any human is not using AI at all. I'm sure the hackathon groups pitching it all started with an idea of building a highly trained AI system whereby the recommendations are meaningful reflections of whatever information it has from you. Unfortunately for them, the most lucrative part of their plan neglected problems with both how to create an AI pipeline that takes many piecemeal inputs, along with millions having missing values represented some way, and renders meaningful outputs and neglected that success would only reap a massive backlash from privacy advocates.

In the end, their plan for a super-intelligent life assistant turns into just fetching event lists from facebook (or elsewhere) without even using the demographic data it has.

[weweersdfsd]

I agree, the real deal would be an AI assistant that actively learns and remembers everything important about you, and can access and utilize all that information when having a conversation, while also having access to external services, your calendar and so on.

I wouldn't be comfortable running that as a cloud-service though. Should be open source and run at home on my own machine.

[magicalhippo]

Right, because if someone else is running it, you can be sure you're getting served thinly veiled ads, something someone else wishes you'd want, rather than something you really like.