John Collison: preference

Transcript context

…It seems like they might be going in that direction. Recently, they announced that it will open up the LLM ecosystem. Hopefully, they will do the same with voice ecosystem, which is similar. I think it's rational to do when it's moving so quickly. The voice assistant paradigm is one of the oldest UI paradigms in computing, like the, "Open the pod bay doors, HAL," from 1969. I will claim it's not working yet. Siri doesn't have the intelligence. Then on Gemini and ChatGPT and those apps, I want to use the voice mode, but I don't know about you, it just doesn't work. Sometimes I'll be using my phone, and I'll use the iOS keyboard transcription to type in the field and then say a bunch of stuff, and then send it off. But this suggests to me that consumers really want voice mode that works, and yet it's just not working yet for the major LLM apps or for anyone. Why isn't it working yet? It is pretty hard to do because you want two things. You want to be able to say things that you want, but you want sometimes for it to execute it, sometimes to wait for you to finish and add something in the sentence. Sometimes you want it to be interactive, so it asks you questions back to clarify and get some of the additional detail. All of that is actually pretty hard. That's where the magical ideal version of a voice agent for us comes through, where you need the speech-to-text element, you need the transcription side, you need then the turn-taking mechanism. When do you finish sentences? When is it likely based on silence, based likely on the context? Then sometimes you want it to speak back and clarify, or at least give you the text back to clarify, and then maybe execute a set of instructions. That problem is still very hard. I agree with the claim that this orchestration side has not passed a true conversational agent Turing test, where it behaves as you would expect from another person, where you can say—…

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