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> Isn't it much more intuitive to say to the computer "play 10 random country" than enunciate a succession of commands / menu items?

Have you ever tried to interact with one of those "natural language" telephone systems? I loath the whole experience. Discoverability is either painful (waiting for a read-through of your options) or futile (guessing blindly and not knowing whether it is your word choice or enunciation that is to blame).




> Discoverability is either painful (waiting for a read-through of your options) or futile (guessing blindly and not knowing whether it is your word choice or enunciation that is to blame).

That is due to the limitations of such voice menus being an audio only interface. There is no reason that a computer couldn't list helpful commands, modifiers (switches), and arguments on the screen as a person rambled about the kind of thing(s) they wanted to do. Given fast, context-aware speech recognition, obviously.


> I loath the whole experience

Because it doesn't really work. But what if it did?




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