“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
Switch to linux, use open source AI. It’s better and private.
ai is the 3d movies of this age.
Honestly, people are rightfully concerned about Microsoft locking down machines, and hackers, and rightfully so, but I think the real insanity is that I do really think LLMs is a tech bubble that I fully expect to burst, and attempting to redesign our lives around it will feel as silly as web3 in 2025.
I wonder when they start removing being able to make administrator account on regular licences and make you beg the ai for anything that requires elevated rights.
Yes, “control.” That’s what Microsoft wants you to have over “your” computer.
"Open the browser. No, not explorer, Edge! Open Edge, god damn it! Go to CNN.com. why did you open another browser window? No, I don’t want to open another browser window. Open the news “Everything sucks and we are all going to die”. Why did you open Bing? Stop asking for confirmation for everything…
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.
Well, Microsoft can eat a bag of dicks.
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.
I love the idea!
I absolutely despise it when it is locked down from the user, owned by the corporation that produced it, and operating as an arm of the surveillance state.
Even discounting the need for safeguards, sanity-checks, and verifiability of information.
Those monstrosities are not allowed in my home until I can remove the spyware operating system.
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.
My autistic brain really struggles with natural language and its context-based nuances. Human language just isn’t built for precision, it’s built for conciseness and efficacy. I don’t see how a machine can do better than my brain.
Agreed. A lot of communication is non-verbal. Me saying something loudly could be due to other sounds in the environment, frustration/anger, or urgency. Distinguishing between those could include facial expressions, gestures with my hands/arms, or any number of non-verbal clues. Many autistic people have difficulty picking up on those cues, and machines are at best similar to the most extreme end of autism, so they tend to make rules like “elevated volume means frustration/anger” when that could very much not be the case.
Verbal communication is designed for human interactions, whether in long-form (conversations) or short-form (issuing commands), and they rely on a lot from the human experience. Human to computer interactions should focus on those strengths, not try to imitate human interaction, because it will always fail at some point. If I get driving instructions from my phone, I want it to be terse (turn right on Hudson Boulevard), whereas if my SO is giving me directions, I’m happy with something more long-form (at that light, turn right), because my SO knows how to communicate unambiguously to me whereas my phone does not.
So yeah, I’ll probably always hate voice-activation, because it’s just not how I prefer to communicate w/ a computer.
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.
Actually there’s one part of Windows that doesn’t suck – font rendering. Even with fonts copied straight out of C:\Windows\Fonts, no matter how many config files I edited, I couldn’t recreate Microsoft’s ClearType, no matter Mint (MATE), Kubuntu or Debian (LXDE).
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?”
Microsoft has no say what happens on my workstation, and never had any.
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.
