Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by NikolaNovak 20 days ago
This is fascinating to me.

Whether that's due to my slight autism or massive nerdery, I don't want more realistic voice. I already switched to non-advanced voice in gpt, and I cannot imagine wanting the mmmhms, the yesses, the laughs, in my ai interaction. I want to ask a structured question and get a structured meaningful response. Informative and structured are really the KPIs. The umms and ahms of existing gpt advanced voice are annoying enough, the recent increased usage of first person almost a deal breaker (when asking for bike technique on lose surfaces yesterday, it literally gave me "back when I was learning bikes riding" story - eww).

Fascinating to see the architectural advances though, even when they deliver something I personally don't need :)

2 comments

100% agree, its also disturbing that they want to make seem like a human.

I suspect most people would prefer it to behave like the computer in star trek. just be there, and be responsive in direct polite ways. dont try to be a friend, dont try to pretend its people. its not. its fucking code.

People here? Maybe. The rest of the world? I really don't think so! From what I've seen, people really don't like when these models behave robotically, they seem to want them to become indistinguishable from humans in their view, with the biggest difference being that the model should not disagree with them if they don't want it at that model. I've seen way too many people that explicitly want a "friend that never says no to me" type of thing from LLMs. That's far from everyone, but that's literally the second most wanted use case I've seen from random people I've met, with the first being "Google but easier".
Honestly I find it distracting when people do the mmmhmm thing. I don’t find it encouraging or helpful or whatever.
When I go into listening node, I listen. Actively and intensely.

Apparently it unnerves people. My wife coaches me to give occasional Yes,Go On, or UhHuh. But it's a conscious, learned, active mechanism for me. Intuitively, I'll tell you if we've weered off my desired conversation path and I'd ask the same courtesy. I've learned very late in life it's apparently an autism thing. Either way, I don't seek mmms and umms in real live people and I especially don't need fake ones in a machine :)

TCP vs UDP. ;) Both have their uses.