![]() Switching to one of the pen-based tablets provided a much more focused way to write without interruptions, and importing work into the computer afterwards was pretty easy. Using speech recognition to dictate a paragraph, for instance, gave my aching wrists some time to recover. While none of these products could completely replace my keyboard, they did provide interesting alternatives, and a change can be as good as a rest. I used two devices that employ “smart pens” and found them great for scribblers and note–takers, but both were quite dependent on good penmanship: If you have a scrawly, illegible hand, they won’t be able to translate your spider scribbles into text. It had a huge amount of neo-Luddite, focused writing charm, but the handwriting-to-text conversion isn’t perfect. I tested a desktop tablet that lets you write longhand on an E Ink screen, converting your scribbles into text on the computer screen. ![]() The dictation software I used was surprisingly effective, but talking to myself all day made me feel like a lunatic. Each comes with benefits that make some things easier and more comfortable, but make other tasks more difficult. ![]() Which, you know, is understandable," Birner said.So, do any of these products really replace the keyboard for me? No. With a car there's a real danger, so you need to really, really trust the artificial intelligence there, and I think people don't understand how far artificial intelligence and natural language processing have gotten, and they're not going to trust it with their life. Your toaster-I mean it could kill you, but you've really got to work at it. "The other thing I mean, the obvious thing, is your car can kill you. Right? My mind in communication with yours," she told me. ![]() That we use language to communicate and we have a notion of what communication means, and it means another mind. "We'll talk to our dogs, but we may not want to talk to our toaster. So I think there is something in human beings that is hesitant to talk to something that is not another sentient being," said Betty Birner, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Northern Illinois University. For thousands of years it has developed as an inherently social system. "I think part of it is just that there's something inherently social about language. A 5,000-lb car is not the same as a smartphone Some of that is an exposure problem-as mentioned earlier, good voice control systems are not widely distributed yet.īut even among my colleagues who test the same cars for other outlets, I'm mostly greeted with skepticism when I praise good voice interfaces. Despite a generation of nerds growing up with the adventures of KITT and Michael Knight, it seems like no one else wants to talk to their cars. My enthusiasm for talking to cars appears to put me in a minority. Having passengers in the car doesn't pose many problems, either-something you can't say about BMW's gesture control when the front-seat passenger talks with their hands. The voice recognition is even good enough to understand me when I tell it to navigate to a specific address, to the point that I actually use the native navigation systems if I'm driving a modern BMW or Mercedes rather than relying on CarPlay like everyone else. Or you can be specific-telling the car to "set the front temperature to 75 degrees" or "turn on the seat heater to level 2" is, to me at least, a lot easier than remembering which segment of a touchscreen I'm supposed to poke. You can be general with your commands-if you tell the car "I'm cold," it will bump up the cabin temperature, for example. In these cars, some of which are also pretty decent EVs, you really can dispense with poking the touchscreen for most functions while you're driving. You don't actually have to imagine it if you've used a recent BMW with iDrive 8 or a Mercedes-Benz with MBUX-admittedly, a rather small sample population. Imagine it: a car that understands your accent, lets you interrupt its prompts, and actually does what you ask rather than spitting back a "Sorry Dave, I can't do that." ![]() After years of being, frankly, quite rubbish, voice control in cars has finally gotten really good. Mostly, the industry has added touch to the near-ubiquitous infotainment screen-it makes manufacturing simpler and cheaper and UI design more flexible, even if there's plenty of evidence that touchscreen interfaces increase driver distraction.īut as I've been discovering in several new cars recently, there may be a better way to tell our cars what to do-literally telling them what to do, out loud. Over the past decade or so, cars have become pretty complicated machines, with often complex user interfaces. ![]()
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