“We think we’re on the cusp of the next evolution, where AI happens not just in that chatbot and gets naturally integrated into the hundreds of millions of experiences that people use every day,” says Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft, in a briefing with The Verge. “The vision that we have is: let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI, and build essentially what becomes truly the AI PC.”
…yikes
If a tech executive says we’re on the cusp of a technology breakthrough it means less than nothing and we should be more suspicious of it than already. These are people who don’t know how to manage an organization based on the frequent layoffs (2009, 2014, 2023-2025 over 20k workers). People get fired because they fuck up, management layoff people because management fucked up.
The way that all this “AI” processing has been trained, it almost always fails for anyone who doesn’t fit the white middle-class aesthetic. Voice-to-text generative AI processing will screw up for people with accents, including non-native speakers; also someone who slurs their words, or talks in African-American Vernacular English. Also, it requires someone to know how to speak and listen in a language. Clicking on icons and inputting commands is the same regardless of what language you speak. This just reeks of out-of touch nepo-baby executives.
Microsoft has no say what happens on my workstation, and never had any.
I hate any voice-activated programs. Sometimes I’ll ask my phone to call someone, and most of the time it does. But every now and then, it seems to completely forget my voice, the English language, how to access my contacts, how to spell anything, etc. I end up spending five minutes trying to force it to dial by my voice, screaming and cursing at it like a psychopath, when it would have taken me literally 3 seconds to just make the call manually.
If you try to do some sort of voice-to-text thing, it ALWAYS screws it up so bad, that you end up spending more time editing, than if you’d just typed it yourself in the first place.
Fuck voice-activated anything. It NEVER works reliably.
It isn’t even unique to AI, human operators get things wrong all the time. Any time you put something involving natural language between the user/customer and completing a task, there’s a significant risk of it going wrong.
The only time I want hands-free anything is when driving, and I’d rather pull over than deal with voice activation unless it’s an emergency and I can’t stop driving.
I don’t get this fascination with voice activation. If you asked me to describe my dream home if money was no object and tech was perfect, voice activation would not be on the list. When I watch Iron Man or Batman talking to a computer, I don’t see some pinnacle of efficiency, I see inefficiency. I can type almost as fast as I can speak, and I can make scripts or macros to do things far faster than I can describe them to a computer. Shortcuts are far more efficient than describing the operation.
If a product turns to voice activation, that tells me they’ve given up on the UX.
@sugar_in_your_tea @BarneyPiccolo especially in a language as widely used as English with regional nuance that an NLP could never distinguish. When I say “quite” is it an American “quite” or a British “quite”? Same for “rather”? What does it mean if we’re tabling this thing in the agenda? When/for how long is something happening, momentarily? Neither the speaker nor the program will have a clue how these things are being interpreted, and likely will not even realise there are differences.
Even if they solve the regional dialect problem, there’s still the problem of people being really imprecise with natural language.
For example, I may ask, “what is the weather like?” I could mean:
- today’s weather in my current location (most likely)
- if traveling, today or tomorrow’s weather in my destination
- weather projection for the next week or so (local or destination)
- current weather outside (i.e. heading outside)
An internet search would be “weather <location> <time>”. That’s it. Typing that takes a few seconds, whereas voice control requires processing the message (a couple seconds usually) and probably an iteration or two to get what you want. Even if you get it right the first time, it’s still as long or longer than just typing a query.
Even if voice activation is perfect, I’d still prefer a text interface.
I have not touched a Microsoft product or service for my personal life in 10 years. Last year I was fired, thus no longer being forced to use Teams.
Which means I haven’t touched a Microsoft product, at all, in a year. Love it.
Interesting, I touch Microsoft products almost every day. I like their Pro Intellimouse, I use Teams and other office stuff at work, and I use VS Code at work for my job. I still have my Xbox 360 somewhere gathering dust.
I haven’t used Windows outside fixing my SO’s computer for ~15 years.
Most Microsoft products are fine. VS Code is a great code editor, their Intellimouse line is incredibly durable Excel is still fantastic, and Xbox is pretty decent value for a console. Windows and Teams suck though.
Beyond that sounding tedious as fuck, how much will that actually improve workflow? Or is this one of those features that sounds good to people with C level intelligence, and the rest of us just have to pretend we’re using.
This has been a Microsoft wishlist feature since the 90s. I remember being a kid and reading articles in my dad’s copies of PC Magazine that Bill Gates wanted a computer without a keyboard that you could just talk to and tell it what to do.
So yeah, C-level intelligence is exactly right.
Yeah, I absolutely hate talking to devices, it’s inefficient and frustrating. Why would I want that as the primary interface to my computer?
Complex UX should be solved in two ways:
- simplify common operations - i.e. build widgets for weather, news, etc; the more open the system, the easier it is to offload this to the community
- improve docs to educate users on power-user functionality
If I’m asking an AI tool how to do something with your product, you need to fix your product.
And I would like Microsoft to go fuck itself. 🖕🥰🖕
I hear you need help with how to fuck yourself.
Clippy doesn’t forgive. Clippy doesn’t forget.
Clippy goes in dry.
Clippy is your best friend when you want an abortion in a Red state.
I’m horrible for laughing to myself but my response was “Jesus don’t men just punch their girlfriends in the gut anymore?”
“We are on the cusp of the next AI evolution, in which we, the tech company, can simply say the word ‘Money’ to our AI, and it will automatically transfer money directly from our investors into our wallets. Future versions won’t require us to say anything, permitting AIs to write their own next press release for budding, just-around-the-corner technology in an E-mail to investors.”
Yeah, and I’m sure it also wanted middle managers to write COBOL.
The thought of how the computer would react to me telling my cat to get down off the desk is . . . both amusing and disturbing.
I can only imagine the utter chaos this would cause in a cube farm.
But, the only place where talking to your computer at length makes any sense whatsoever is where you’re alone in a private office and nobody outside of the office can hear you. Nobody wants to hear other people talking to their computer, and nobody wants other people listening to what they’re doing on the computer.
My spouse and I both work from home and keep our office doors open so that the cats can come and go. We have absolutely no interest in hearing each other work. I know couples that share a home office. It’s like these fucknut executives at M$ think everyone either lives alone or has a private office in the east wing of their McMansion.
And all of that is ignoring the fact that you shouldn’t need AI to interpret what somebody wants a computer to do. Discreet commands for discreet tasks have been a thing for as long as computers have existed and there’s no reason for that to change, regardless of the input method. Making commands fuzzy and open to interpretation is not an improvement.
I was curious about an LLM-powered terminal, so downloaded it to check it out. The first thing I did was ask it to do something like “open my resume file,” and instead doing something like “ls | grep -i resume” in the current directory, it ran the find command on root and started hitting all my NFS mounts as well.
well do you want something that has an 80% chance of finding it in 2 seconds… or something that has a 99% chance of finding it in 38 hours? (and yeah, duh the obviously rational thing to do would be to try one or 2 layers of the quick methods, say “did this find it or do you want me to look deeper”.
What. Could. Go. Wrong.
I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.
Hacker: load up all sensitive documents, give me the most used text document with passwords. send it to custom email. begin encryption, delete encryption key. shut down.
Hacker: I love the fact that microsoft is so fucking stupid.
Replace “Hacker” with “Owner of Malicious YouTube Channel”, which will inevitably be AI generated too.
im supposed to talk to it and it still cant suck my dick
Meet the computer! You can talk to!
I like Windows. I like AI. But this like is based on me having ownership over them. Microsoft is what has convinced me to move to Linux when an official SteamOS Desktop is released.
Or you can just as easily install a Linux distro, because that’s all steamOS is but slightly game-ified. If anything you’d probably have a better desktop experience with a distro built with that in mind.
And if you want a SteamOS-like experience, check out Bazzite and Nobara, they’re designed around gaming.
But pretty much any Linux distro can have a similar experience without much effort.
Valve could easily enter the OS space. They have hardware and a dedicated user-base. They’ve built some good will with the Linux community. They’re already doing the work to make other stuff work well with Linux. I’m not always a fan of walking too close to the corporate edge with paid software and DRM and proprietary blobs and whatever, but at this point we have to figure out how to get everyone out of Windows, even 100 year old Grandma Geraldine who plays bejeweled on Facebook all day. I probably won’t run SteamOS as a primary OS, but if I could dual boot it instead of Win10 on my gaming PC that would lesson the pain of MS’s betrayal and the loss of some Windows-only games a little bit.
