This is really impressive, but personally I'd rather interact with such agents in typed text, at least as the input method. But maybe I'm just too old.
No, I think tend to think your preferences are common.
Until a robot voice gets an appealing personality that people enjoy talking to, people will avoid interacting with "robo voices" if at all possible. Even though may interactions with voice recognition applications have reached the point of being "seamless", I still dislike the things.
Another factor is that voice isn't very desirable for things that involve only formally specifying something. If you type out the key word-preferences for recommendations, you can see what they are and change them easily. If you interact by voice, you'd need to have your preferences tediously read back to you.
Even if a person has a human assistant to perform various chores for them, the value of that assistant would derive from being able to make choices wouldn't want to overtly make or think about yourself - someone who would buy clothes for a person with no interest in fashion but needed to look good for example. Even in this case, you'd want the preferences for your assistant spelled out so much as it made sense. Once robot voices pleasant enough, they'll probably still want to supplement any interactions with "notes about the conversation" that the person could also edit.
I do agree that speech-based interfaces can be very cumbersome. Part of this is that current systems aren't perfect yet but part of it is also that speaking aloud is just plain strenuous for people. At least the second thing isn't going to go away.
Some of the things you touched on are certainly valid points, but spoken language systems also have big advantages. For example, having to spend effort for fully form a thought (to articulate it coherently), forces users to spend a second think about what they actually want. Also, and this was a part of this research, the spoken voice carries quite cool side-channel information that can be exploited in aiding recommendation.
In any case, please note that the current UI (which, btw, did show the gathered preferences to some extend by coloring / bolding the shown specs proportionally to the level of satisfaction of your determined preferences / the level of influence) is just a research UI. It does not implement the best I could do, but rather implements an interface that I allowed good interpretability of the results of the conducted study (which, for example, excluded any multi-modal efforts which would have potentially made drawing conclusions harder).
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 21.4 ms ] threadUntil a robot voice gets an appealing personality that people enjoy talking to, people will avoid interacting with "robo voices" if at all possible. Even though may interactions with voice recognition applications have reached the point of being "seamless", I still dislike the things.
Another factor is that voice isn't very desirable for things that involve only formally specifying something. If you type out the key word-preferences for recommendations, you can see what they are and change them easily. If you interact by voice, you'd need to have your preferences tediously read back to you.
Even if a person has a human assistant to perform various chores for them, the value of that assistant would derive from being able to make choices wouldn't want to overtly make or think about yourself - someone who would buy clothes for a person with no interest in fashion but needed to look good for example. Even in this case, you'd want the preferences for your assistant spelled out so much as it made sense. Once robot voices pleasant enough, they'll probably still want to supplement any interactions with "notes about the conversation" that the person could also edit.
I do agree that speech-based interfaces can be very cumbersome. Part of this is that current systems aren't perfect yet but part of it is also that speaking aloud is just plain strenuous for people. At least the second thing isn't going to go away.
Some of the things you touched on are certainly valid points, but spoken language systems also have big advantages. For example, having to spend effort for fully form a thought (to articulate it coherently), forces users to spend a second think about what they actually want. Also, and this was a part of this research, the spoken voice carries quite cool side-channel information that can be exploited in aiding recommendation.
In any case, please note that the current UI (which, btw, did show the gathered preferences to some extend by coloring / bolding the shown specs proportionally to the level of satisfaction of your determined preferences / the level of influence) is just a research UI. It does not implement the best I could do, but rather implements an interface that I allowed good interpretability of the results of the conducted study (which, for example, excluded any multi-modal efforts which would have potentially made drawing conclusions harder).