Ask HN: Do you have daily voice conversations with AI?
We are starting a new family project, and I have been struggling with some of the finer details. On my morning walk, I started a voice conversation with ChatGPT in which I explored some of the items. This was my first time really spending time talking with an AI agent instead of typing in a window. WOW - I was truly blown away. Not only did I finish my walk in good time, I had the opportunity to explore different angles to the project I had not yet considered. For me, this was a true game changer in the way I want to tackle problems in the future. I was more motivated at the end of my walk than the beginning. I realize some people hate AI, but I honestly find the voice conversations very helpful when dealing with complex issues.
I am curious: How many others on HN have voice conversations with AI? What is your experience? Do you find it immersive or not? Do you keep the topics to technical stuff, or do you explore other things?
I do not want to talk to devices. Ever.
Speech is a low-bandwidth communication medium. It also has a high error rate, even with two native speakers who know each other well and who are physically close to each other.
Speech is also linear in nature, unless you are being rude and interrupting the other person.
In human communication, 90% of the content is provided through means other than audio. Its visual. It’s your body language. It’s what is going on around you, and what you are paying attention to. It’s your mannerisms, and how you stand or sit, and what you do with your hands. In video calls, you lose a lot of that context, because your video window onto the other person is so greatly constrained.
Of the remainder, 90% of the content is not the words being spoken. It’s your tone of voice, your inflection, whether you are talking fast or slow, how loud you are talking, etc…. On the telephone or on a video call, again there is so much compression, and those calls are almost always done without a central computer processing system that can meaningfully handle more than one audio stream at a time. And computers are still pretty rubbish at understanding all that audio.
That leaves just 1% of the total communication being the words that are spoken. And computers are still pretty rubbish at understanding that, too.
Speaking to devices works great on Star Trek, because what you’re really doing is explaining to the audience at home some important thing they need to know, in the guise of speaking to a computer. But the “computer” here is actually a piece of cardboard, or maybe an Okudagram printed on transparent plastic.
The real world is not like that.
100% agree. Talking to machines, with my voice, is one of those hard lines I've had for a while.
I'm also highly introverted, and need to save that energy for actual people that I like.
Nice idea! We made live avatar which can speak with people in live in all soc med platforms same time, but people are not ready for this yet :( some of people wrote AI and leave (but name of live contain that there is AI avatar)… other people just started to getting fun and ask to tell bad words or other stupid things. So we decided to skip 1-2 year with this project and return it back, when people will be more developed and will not comment that we should hire people and pay them money for this job instead of paying for servers and steal job from other people…
Tech stuff 100%. Do this, do that, fix this bug, improve another thing, etc. It is a computer program that simply seems to understand what I need. I give the most correct directions like I would if was I writting a program for the compiler to understand me and I understand what the compiler wants.
I don’t but I really want to. I think voice interfaces for AI are the future. For a while I was using speech to text when promoting Claude code but stopped for some reason. Gonna begin again thanks for the motivates.
Nope that costs too many tokens lol (also performance is worse compared to their text counterparts from what I’ve noticed….)
I only sometimes talk to ChatGPT while on a walk in the morning. I just play 20 questions with it or ask it about the news. That's it. It's conversational ability is pretty cool, though. It'd probably be awesome if it wasn't like talking to a corporate PR representative.
I had discussed with AI if we should suture rodents to the head of elephants, to solve their baldness problem, and make them more attractive to females, if we should create giant killer worms, like in dune, if we should use kangaroos as politicians, or if alpacas are evil, and are planning something.
The AI always took it seriously, and refused to help.
Still? Never did, hope to never in the future.