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by ninkendo 1312 days ago
> This does not follow from the above

Well, I elaborated after. There's an actual finite set of skills that are coded up by actual engineers. A natural language system isn't hallucinating the ABI for the function calls that send text messages. There's code there which takes the utterance and sends the texts. What I'm saying is that you can take an inventory of what skills have been written (and/or are installed), and y'know... document them somewhere.
1 comments
sofetch 1312 days ago
> you can take an inventory of what skills have been written (and/or are installed), and y'know... document them somewhere.

Sure. I didn't take exception with anything except the standard HN middlebrow dismissal.

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ninkendo 1312 days ago
I'm not giving a middlebrow dismissal. There exists a real discoverability problem with virtual assistants, and asking users to "just try things" leads them to try things that don't work, and then conclude that the assistant must not be as useful as they thought.

Moreover, when an assistant doesn't do a thing, you're unlikely to try it again later; instead most people will conclude "I guess it can't do that" and move on. If they add the feature later, it's too late.

With every failed request, your confidence that an assistant really is intelligent and can understand you, diminishes more and more. Every time a user hits a dead end with a virtual assistant, it doesn't encourage them to try more things that do work, it instead gives the user less confident that anything will.

I can't count the number of times my wife has been surprised I can get Siri to do things. Her typical response is "I can never get her to understand me so I just stick with timers." It's a real problem, and I'm not being dismissive of anything.

In contrast, reread your comment in this context. You're taking my comment, reading in the least charitable way, condescending to me about the meaning of finite when the rest of my comment clarifies what I mean, and being completely dismissive of the point I'm trying to make. How can you say I'm the one issuing middlebrow dismissals?

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