If only there was some sort of device that would allow you to input those commands without interfering with others, or vice versa... But it's probably just a dream...
Every husband here is sad for all those years he didn't knew these existed. Mothers and teachers wonder if these are available in kid-sizes. Kids wonder what glue works on both this device and the teachers skin.
I've seen those things 10 years ago when somebody was helping a deaf student in university. Used one of those things to talk to a text to speech engine during the lecture. Seemed to work quite well.
They suck, you can't get air into them without destroying the noise cancelling part so you've got to constantly be taking it off to take a breath / running out of oxygen mid sentence
I have never seen anyone except streamers try this out in all honesty, I doubt the article is actually truthful. Even vibe coders understand how to type.
I love the implication that he's speaking to the AI and wants to not disturb people, but has no headphones on. so I can only assume it's responding from the speakers.
::: spoiler note
Yes, I know it could be responding over text instead of voice.
:::
Older people such as myself tend to hate voice-to-text I think because it was so awful in the past. And if you screwed up with it in the past it was a less understandable excuse that “I was using voice-to-text.” And because we were all forced in some way to learn to type well.
Voice to text works a little bit better now. And I think younger people know everyone else uses it and to forgive when it screws up.
It worked better five years ago before they replaced the existing algorithms with AI bullshit. Keeps adding slurs to my dictionary too since they replaced keyboard prediction with modern AI and so many people use slurs Google just assumes I do too.
I'm going to need significant levels of convincing. Computers have always preferred specificity and accuracy, it's half the reason I'm in my current position (MSP Escalations/level 3, half of my success at fixing issues is being extremely specific in looking up exact error messages instead of paraphrasing).
This isn't a defense of AI; on the contrary, it's my doubt that AI can read intentions/inflection/emotion better than just writing out what you actually want.
Deepseek recently published a paper in which they describe that vision tokens contain more information than text tokens and that this can be used to compress context.
We present DeepSeek-OCR as an initial investigation into the feasibility of compressing long
contexts via optical 2D mapping.
Experiments
show that when the number of text tokens is within 10 times that of vision tokens (i.e., a
compression ratio < 10×), the model can achieve decoding (OCR) precision of 97%. Even at a
compression ratio of 20×, the OCR accuracy still remains at about 60%. This shows considerable
promise for research areas such as historical long-context compression and memory forgetting
mechanisms in LLMs.
It reminds me of LLM caveman speak, it used to have another option to use Chinese instead of English. A language like Chinese is seemingly better at encoding information in fewer tokens and I think this is the same mechanism why OCR tokens work so well.
That said, I also doubt that voice messages are more efficient than text prompts, but it's best not to waste too much time engaging with these sorts of LinkedIn posts (and LinkedIn in general).
Lol you think stocks will be worth shit in 20 years? This fish is going belly up and the AI IPOs are about to steal all of our retirememt funds (if you even had any).
Anyone 30 and younger knows this shit is temporary at best and collapse is within our life times.
Anyone 30 or younger has their entire brain filled with social media programming and fear. :)
The entire idea is to make you scared of saving, you dummy. I mean that in a funny way. You should never make decisions based on what social media is telling you. Social media is programming, gossip, big headlines... Building on news. Who owns the news? Billionaries. Who owns the platforms? Billionaries.
You know, this "soon collapse is coming" has been said since 2019.
In my opinion, the fear of collapse is exactly what they want you to feel, so you don't make any money from the dystopian build-out.
But they are making money on it. Oh yes. Stocks go up because huge investment bankers are buying all the stocks they are telling you to be afraid of in the news.
You can sit and have no stocks and lose no money if you want, but you are betting on a crash that you are being told will happen "soon".. :) We will see. Chances are, you miss making a lot of money on this and afterwards, you will feel a bit sad you missed it.
As bad as AI is. It is still a new technology and it's an arms race right now. Lemmy is influenced heavily by Chinese bots. Lemmy is also small but not small enough to be ignored. It leans left and towards tech users. If you go back to see the early posts for AI, you'll see a ton of astro turfing. Again, AI has issues. But if you follow right wing media you can see the markers of propaganda and astro turfing because the always need to churn new ideas. For example MAID was new in Canada. The right needed to get everybody on board. So early on you could see a big push in regards to content that isn't organic.
It was the same here on the left with AI. The difference here is that it isn't from the right. American right want to embrace this and build data centers. I suspect that China is behind it and wants to create chaff on the left to prevent us from actually building and innovating with AI. At the same time it's also a tool that can rapidly parse text, semantic analysis, opsec and investigations. Which can help create tools to help detect more astroturfing and bots online which powers that be really do not want the left to do. So they really produced so much content to push us all against it. To the point if anyone even smells AI you all instantly swarm. That's manufactured in the same way the right respond to opinions they're given. If you told someone on the right that their opinions on abortion or guns or patriotism is heavily influenced by special interest, what would they say? Would the agree or tell you it's not politics it's common sense
in this one picture, I see generations of so many individual great ideas coalescing into one fantastically bad idea (and stupidly comical consequence) that is so... bizarre that I can both simultaneously understand why nobody really saw it coming, and am in low-key disbelief that this is even real...
I mean, that's a steno mask, and anyone who's had issues with hand pain but wants to communicate via text has probably wished for something resembling this. The problem is that they're obnoxiously expensive. (And they look ridiculous, but that's its own issue.)
When I'm in public, I wish people had these. I neither need nor want to listen to your phone conversations.
Their price is so dumb, that thing shouldn't cost that much
Just like those accessibility tools that let you use control the mouse pointer using only your mouth etc etc, they have stupid prices when some aren't even that complex
They're a niche product that has a very solid use case (court transcripts). They require far less training than a stenotype, but because they're so niche, the people who do make them can more-or-less charge what they want. If we're being less skeptical, the low demand means the manufacturers can't take advantage of the efficiencies of scale, so the price remains high.
Maybe not though. If the biggest companies in the US are discovering AI is more expensive than paying US based employees, AI is certainly more expensive than paying employees in most other parts of the world too.
Sewing/designing clothes really clicked for me. Haven't tried woodworking, but I imagine it scratches the same itch and utilizes similar skills: 90% of sewing is just planning, calculation, and measuring. Then, watch everything just fit together into place
Never hesitate to rescue wooden pallets, but don't waste gas on retrieving them either. You can use an iron railroad tie as a chisel for dismantling them
I would rather do almost anything than talk to a device, except in very specific circumstances.
I set timers and play music on a smart speaker somewhat often.
Occasionally, when I am alone, know exactly what I want to say, and my hands are full, I might dictate a text message.
But other than that, I will not be talking to my device, thanks. The human voice is primarily for talking to other humans, with all the imprecision and uncertainty and emotional resonance that entails. Keyboards are great tools designed for precise computer input, and I would like to continue to use them.
i dont think ive ever used a speach computer interface that wasnt hot garbage and misunderstood half of what i said unless i talked to it really slow like it was an idiot. pretty much every time it would have been faster to use the tactile interface. i dont even have that much of an accent compared to generic american.
Yeah, I have colleagues who choose to work in the office when work from home is available because they like the separation of work from home, don't have a good spot to work from home, are aware they would be distracted at home, prefer to see other people in person, and a bunch of other reasons. At least they get a choice!
Every day I'm a little surprised there's no news story of some workers beating their "no, you have to come into the office" manager to death. They've got means, motive, and opportunity, and it's extra funny because if they'd been allowed to work at home they wouldn't have at least two of those.
But really we're ruled by the worst of us. Cowards and fools.
Maybe unionizing is safer than hitting the decision makers with an office chair while screaming "you made this possible" until they can't even cry anymore.
Well what I'm trying to tell you is that there are probably more people than you realise who want to be in the office. My partner, and a bunch of my coworkers, hated being forced to work from home during the pandemic. So maybe that's part of the reason.
I can't imagine wanting to go into the office on the regular. The commute. The lost time (can math out to like a 20% pay cut, if you spend two hours a day traveling + getting ready). The sickness. The lack of control over environment (temperature, sound).
Can't relate to it. And I'm a very social person that likes interacting with people.
I live 15 minutes from work. If I got out of bed early enough I could easily bike there (and have done so).
Really the only thing I miss from work from home is the ability to take a short break once per hour to do some bodyweight exercises or kettbell swings during lunch.
But on the flipside, it's hard for me to stay concentrated while at home. I personally get way more work done in the office.
But on the flipside, it’s hard for me to stay concentrated while at home.
While I believe that is true for you, I don't believe it justifies the lost time, health, and environmental damage of mandating in-office for everyone.
Hook them up to a simulation, yes, like The Matrix! In this simulation they get to do everything they dream of.
Crypto shitcoins as far as the eye can see. Their stonks all go to the moon. Everybody is prompting Ai any time their neurons accidentally bump together. The simulation will accurately simulate an entire earth population just prompting AI and glued to their phones. Look! More profits! Wow.
Ai gambling! Ai sports! Ai art! Ai dating! Ai social media! Ai business! Ai porn! It's all here in ✨ Techbro Land ✨.
We can even accurately simulate mass misery of the general population so our little tenants feel superior! Meanwhile, the Techbro doesn't need to sleep. They believe they unlocked the code to Immortality by micro dosing various hallucinogens and stimulants, allowing them to spend 100% of their day in a chair reviewing an Ai agent's reviewing of vibe code!
There are no "regulations" or even governments in ✨ Techbro Land ✨ . There's a single AI Simulated Singularity (A.S.S) TechBroKing Fascist that makes all the memes, and punishes all the poor working consumption class. Every living situation is AirBnB. All the cars are self driving 24 ton pickups. Trains only exist to ship drones and supplies for infinite data centers and government contracts.
Computing is subscription only, games are rented by the minute, nobody owns anything.
Profits go up and up and up and up and up without end. No climate change, despite the global temperature going up 12⁰C, wars are fought daily with killer robots...I could go on.
The important thing is: These little hoodie-clad megalomanics can't even tell they're actually just locked safely away from the rest of us in stasis in a former mega data center.
...The rest of us, in the real world, take the best of our computing standards with us, and dial all the bullshit back to like 2004 and try this shit again.
The hard part of both speech and typing is thinking about what you say. Typing nor speaking are going to change the speed I can get information into the computer.
I'm faster hitting a key than I am dictating it -- there are more speakos than typos because my accent doesn't match a Bay Area accent and gets misparsed.
I'm not really into it but one of the guys on late night linux podcast, generally resistant to LLMs and shiny new things, is a fan of speech to text for general computing, as in every input field in the OS should support speech. In a recent episode he said that he believes it to be the way of the future.
I remember Dragon SpeechDragon Naturally Speaking saying the same thing in the 90's. It's improved, but not enough to make it useful as more than an aide for people who can't type. I do agree, that for simple accessibility, it should be integrated into every field, but I doubt it's ever going to take over.
As others have noted, that it's only technically true that dictation is faster than typing. In a practical sense, there's a fair number of reasons why that's not the case, including that usually thinking about the entry is what's the slowest, and also the errors in both are typically what slows people down.
there's also the problem of, for example, keeping entries confidential. You don't want to speak your passwords where others can hear you.
It’s improved, but not enough to make it useful as more than an aide for people who can’t type.
I don't think this is true.
There's a locally hostable model called whisper that is very impressive.
My plumber uses speech to text to send text messages all day.
Late Night Linux guy says he uses it for microsoft teams quite a bit.
You're only partially correct about input speed. If you want to dictate an email then yes you need to think about each word you want to say and the order in which to say them. Coupled with an LLM that problem is diminished because you can just kind of have a conversation with the LLM and tell it to draft an email.
You’re only partially correct about input speed. If you want to dictate an email then yes you need to think about each word you want to say and the order in which to say them. Coupled with an LLM that problem is diminished because you can just kind of have a conversation with the LLM and tell it to draft an email.
and how much of that conversation with an LLM is "No, what I want is..." because it assumed something; or just straight up hallucinated or the typo made it go off on a tangent?
As for whisper, I can find sources that are saying for American-English speakers in a not-noisy environment (aka the best case scenario,) the model has a word error rate between 2-8%. For reference, Dragon NaturallySpeaking had a WER of 3-5%. So I wouldn't say that Whisper has made any substantial improvements, and they're OpenAi. you can trust them if you want. I don't think that'll work out well in the long run, though.
I'd like to see the source that says Dragon's WER in the 90s was 3-5%. I used Dragon in the 2000s and it just wasn't comparable to the current state of the art.
whisper.cpp is an opensource implementation, although I'm not certain exactly how open.
when you're providing context rather than instructions the tendency for a model to hallucinate or run off on a tangent is minimal, because the context you're providing has it's own cohesion.
I’d like to see the source that says Dragon’s WER in the 90s was 3-5%. I used Dragon in the 2000s and it just wasn’t comparable to the current state of the art.
https://dragon-medical-transcription.com/history_speech_recognition.html, for example. a lot of adverts and awards were given to it (admittedly awards like PC Mag that were probably paid advertising... but that's why I went with Open AI's assessment on whisper at 2%.) Dragon was boasting 99% accuracy after (admittedly months) of training; and it frequently reached it. there were some gotchas in that- the months-long training was a big one. The other was that you frequently had to slow down and be careful to enunciate that you don't have to do with modern systems (including the MS versions of Dragon- they bought it out at some point)
whisper.cpp is an opensource implementation, although I’m not certain exactly how open.
It's on the MIT license, if that helps. I take issue with anything OpenAI is involved in. for oh-so-many reasons.
Fuck if I know, all I know is you can sit next to a blender in a busy office full of crying babies and barking dogs while writing a dissertation on an electric typewriter and the person on the other end of the line would never be able to tell. Professional headsets (like in the $300-$500 range) are honestly pretty incredible. If these silicon valley offices are too noisy for a high end EOS to handle, or if they genuinely have that many people constantly talking all day to the point that it's a problem then they need to go back to the drawing board. Steno masks have their place but for anything a garden variety techbro is doing they're either performative bullshit or a lazy bandaid. I guaranfuckingtee bossman has no interest in putting one of these on.
I'm not talking about the people on the other end of the call, I'm talking about the jackass eight feet away dictating things to his imaginary friend while I'm trying to have a conversation with somebody
I think that falls under "back to the drawing board." Functionally there's little difference between talking to a model and taking a call. If management is pushing them to dictate and it's causing a problem they should put them in cubes.
I imagine it's like the Active Noise Canceling (ANC) mode of headphones which will monitor background noise and then calculate the inverse sound wave and play that sound to you which in effect mostly cancels out the background noise (works better for certain frequencies than others). For a microphone they could do the same but instead of playing you the inverse sound, they could play it through the microphone for whomever is listening.
This is such a Kafkaesque cyberpunk dystopian problem. This is needed because owners and managers want open offices for surveillance and coat cutting. They are also aware that only about half of workers thrive in those environments while the other have drops in productivity. Solution a cheap muzzle so that the workers who aren't as productive in noisy environments aren't disturbed.
Meanwhile could you imagine the smell of those things. You'd have to wash them everyday or have some kind of cover for them not to just have a permanent funk.
Lets assume AI can produce production ready code without any problems (this is what these CEOs likely believe anyway). Something that can produce thousands of lines of code per minute is not enough for these greedy fucks that now they want prompts given by speaking so that things move even faster?
Its not even about the speed. Typing allows me to properly get my thoughts out. If something sounds incorrect or confusing, I can always go back and change it before sending. You can't unsay words as easily.
The C-suite people got rich by (to be a little reductionist about it) telling other people what to do, and they can't imagine that everyone else wouldn't leap at the chance to do the same.
Fuck AI, but if this was something those loud public phone people could wear that would be great. Like the dude shouting into his phone on the bus, pair it with some headphones leave us in peace
A water key* is needed in wind instruments because they have long tubing that is likely to be cold enough to condense water out of breath and which hence gets trapped inside it. Not applicable here.
I forget where I read it, but apparently this is being pushed to replace or augment court stenography. Apparently, there is more demand for court recorders than stenographers to fulfill (not sure if this is true, but that’s the claim), so this option is being proposed as the AI dictation requires less training than stenography.
It's a different tool, but for much the same end. I want to say it's more because the device is cheaper than a typical stenography machine would cost, but I don't know that for sure.
So they know their products would be useless in a noisy environment? They can't pick out the voice they need like an actual human being can in a crowd (excluding some with hearing difficulties)?
191 replies
Use a keyboard ya filthy casuals
If only there was some sort of device that would allow you to input those commands without interfering with others, or vice versa... But it's probably just a dream...
Why not give them private offices? If AI is increasing productivity and replacing workers they should have enough space left.
Cap here. The product is called vocal dampener and used by singers during warmup
Every husband here is sad for all those years he didn't knew these existed. Mothers and teachers wonder if these are available in kid-sizes. Kids wonder what glue works on both this device and the teachers skin.
Hahhaha you misunderstand to whom you are speaking. Give me my coding plague trough immediately.
would be the funniest gas chambers yet
Is typing THAT hard?
When you need a nannybot? Yes.
This looks uncomfortable and humiliating. Now if they were to make it in the form of a suppository...
If you're brave enough, anything can become a suppository.
A noise cancelling microphone isn't a terrible invention though.
I've seen those things 10 years ago when somebody was helping a deaf student in university. Used one of those things to talk to a text to speech engine during the lecture. Seemed to work quite well.
I've also seen them on court stenographers and thought they looked cool. Not everyone needs every invention, though.
Thats true this is just the absolute worst use case scenario i can think of
They suck, you can't get air into them without destroying the noise cancelling part so you've got to constantly be taking it off to take a breath / running out of oxygen mid sentence
You talk with your nose?
Your nose in in the mask. It's extremely hard to make a seal around your lips that doesn't include the nose
You don't have allergies or colds?
I have never seen anyone except streamers try this out in all honesty, I doubt the article is actually truthful. Even vibe coders understand how to type.
I just cannot tell if this is satire or not
Welcome to clown world!
Mate they could just type out the prompt instead of dictating with the vader mask.
Techbros will have workers do anything but work from home.
Or have single-person offices instead of an open space
You mean cubicles?
Now I gotta rewatch Severance!
No!
You will love the Open Space Farm.
It's lazy enough to vibe code, but when you're too lazy to even type a prompt.....sheeeesh
What the fuck did I just read?
I love the implication that he's speaking to the AI and wants to not disturb people, but has no headphones on. so I can only assume it's responding from the speakers.
::: spoiler note Yes, I know it could be responding over text instead of voice. :::
Which I think it is even more funny, why not just type them if is not a full audio back and forth.
Because it's faster to speak than type, but reading is more practical than listening, especially if taking information is your main focus.
It's scannable, easier to read and reread selectively important parts, and listening to code is not useful.
Isn’t it cheaper and quieter to just type out your prompts?
This is akin to people who have conversations on speakerphone in public places.
you assume that vibe-coders can actually touch type. or type at all.
Or be capable of critical thinking.
I assumed they were all working from their iphones
AI needs to measure the level of confidence in your voice, to calibrate its bullshit accordingly
I wonder if anyone owns a patent on this idea.
Older people such as myself tend to hate voice-to-text I think because it was so awful in the past. And if you screwed up with it in the past it was a less understandable excuse that “I was using voice-to-text.” And because we were all forced in some way to learn to type well.
Voice to text works a little bit better now. And I think younger people know everyone else uses it and to forgive when it screws up.
It worked better five years ago before they replaced the existing algorithms with AI bullshit. Keeps adding slurs to my dictionary too since they replaced keyboard prediction with modern AI and so many people use slurs Google just assumes I do too.
I hate it because it’s generally intensely US-centric. Not understanding non-US accents or terms.
Speaking is faster than typing, I guess?
Maybe for Eminem.
apparently audio and images are more efficient compared to text for multimodal models?
I'm going to need significant levels of convincing. Computers have always preferred specificity and accuracy, it's half the reason I'm in my current position (MSP Escalations/level 3, half of my success at fixing issues is being extremely specific in looking up exact error messages instead of paraphrasing).
This isn't a defense of AI; on the contrary, it's my doubt that AI can read intentions/inflection/emotion better than just writing out what you actually want.
Deepseek recently published a paper in which they describe that vision tokens contain more information than text tokens and that this can be used to compress context.
It reminds me of LLM caveman speak, it used to have another option to use Chinese instead of English. A language like Chinese is seemingly better at encoding information in fewer tokens and I think this is the same mechanism why OCR tokens work so well.
That said, I also doubt that voice messages are more efficient than text prompts, but it's best not to waste too much time engaging with these sorts of LinkedIn posts (and LinkedIn in general).
LLMs don't need accuracy. This just boils down to speaking being faster than typing, especially if your thought isn't fully formulated.
As far as I know, these workflows typically involve a transcription model to convert the audio to text, and then passing the text to the model.
Before I read the text I thought this was a photo of a stenographer; they used those or similar in depositions I've given.
So typing isn't fast enough to burn all the daily tokens?
The faster you burn them the sooner you knock off for the day.
the faster you burn them the sooner you burnout
Automate it
Have all chatbots you have access to talk to each other through each other to try to solve the problem
"knock off for the day?" Not until you've trained your replacement (LLM)! Then you can take all the time you like, income-free
If I'm being forced to spend AI tokens up in a day I'm spending the rest job hunting.
No but we can automate it
if you talk AND type you can burn twice the tokens and get the same result! it’s a win win win
Have you seen people type? Toich-typing is a lost artform.
They don’t even have to do that. Just don’t pack them in like sardines.
Most type faster than they speak, no?
You'd think so, given how most modern vibe coders talk. But no, they're so bad at typing, they can't do either!
No.
Started hating working in tech a year ago and got out.
What'd you move to?
Retired and living from investments. I'm 51 so was working in tech for a long time.
Start investing if you aren't.
Lol you think stocks will be worth shit in 20 years? This fish is going belly up and the AI IPOs are about to steal all of our retirememt funds (if you even had any).
Anyone 30 and younger knows this shit is temporary at best and collapse is within our life times.
Anyone 30 or younger has their entire brain filled with social media programming and fear. :)
The entire idea is to make you scared of saving, you dummy. I mean that in a funny way. You should never make decisions based on what social media is telling you. Social media is programming, gossip, big headlines... Building on news. Who owns the news? Billionaries. Who owns the platforms? Billionaries.
They're not gonna steal it for long because they themselves will tank soon from all the overvaluation. They may bring about the collapse.
You know, this "soon collapse is coming" has been said since 2019.
In my opinion, the fear of collapse is exactly what they want you to feel, so you don't make any money from the dystopian build-out.
But they are making money on it. Oh yes. Stocks go up because huge investment bankers are buying all the stocks they are telling you to be afraid of in the news.
You can sit and have no stocks and lose no money if you want, but you are betting on a crash that you are being told will happen "soon".. :) We will see. Chances are, you miss making a lot of money on this and afterwards, you will feel a bit sad you missed it.
I have been, but I sure wasn't in tech... never made even $75k any year in my whole life. Maybe I could harness AI to change that...
Back in the day there used to be specialized equipment for this purpose called an office, of which you had your own and could close the door to
That's for management though, the lackeys are kept in cubicles, or the isocubes if they misbehave.
Now is oriffice 😔
This is fox news levels of propaganda but on the left
I missed the political point to the post
As bad as AI is. It is still a new technology and it's an arms race right now. Lemmy is influenced heavily by Chinese bots. Lemmy is also small but not small enough to be ignored. It leans left and towards tech users. If you go back to see the early posts for AI, you'll see a ton of astro turfing. Again, AI has issues. But if you follow right wing media you can see the markers of propaganda and astro turfing because the always need to churn new ideas. For example MAID was new in Canada. The right needed to get everybody on board. So early on you could see a big push in regards to content that isn't organic.
It was the same here on the left with AI. The difference here is that it isn't from the right. American right want to embrace this and build data centers. I suspect that China is behind it and wants to create chaff on the left to prevent us from actually building and innovating with AI. At the same time it's also a tool that can rapidly parse text, semantic analysis, opsec and investigations. Which can help create tools to help detect more astroturfing and bots online which powers that be really do not want the left to do. So they really produced so much content to push us all against it. To the point if anyone even smells AI you all instantly swarm. That's manufactured in the same way the right respond to opinions they're given. If you told someone on the right that their opinions on abortion or guns or patriotism is heavily influenced by special interest, what would they say? Would the agree or tell you it's not politics it's common sense
You got all that from this meme? U.s.a. is, as the kids over there say, cooked
AI bad.
Is that a political stance now?
Everything is politics.
Everything is affected by politics but an opinion isn't always inherently political
Yes it is.
Why is AI bad? Massive waste, destroying the planet, not very useful.
Why do AI CEOs say it's amazing? Why do governments keep pushing it? Money.
That's politics.
Yes, AI is bad. Astute observation.
in this one picture, I see generations of so many individual great ideas coalescing into one fantastically bad idea (and stupidly comical consequence) that is so... bizarre that I can both simultaneously understand why nobody really saw it coming, and am in low-key disbelief that this is even real...
I mean, that's a steno mask, and anyone who's had issues with hand pain but wants to communicate via text has probably wished for something resembling this. The problem is that they're obnoxiously expensive. (And they look ridiculous, but that's its own issue.)
When I'm in public, I wish people had these. I neither need nor want to listen to your phone conversations.
Their price is so dumb, that thing shouldn't cost that much
Just like those accessibility tools that let you use control the mouse pointer using only your mouth etc etc, they have stupid prices when some aren't even that complex
They're a niche product that has a very solid use case (court transcripts). They require far less training than a stenotype, but because they're so niche, the people who do make them can more-or-less charge what they want. If we're being less skeptical, the low demand means the manufacturers can't take advantage of the efficiencies of scale, so the price remains high.
of course it’s not, because every laptop and airpod has
noise cancellinginput isolationBut as far as rage bait goes, top tier
I think this is a microphone with noise isolation, rather than noise cancelation from speakers.
Thanks, edited for meaning
Hook it up to a bong and you've suddenly made work a hell of a lot more interesting.
I was gonna fill mine with oatmeal and chow down, but I think there's some good work we can do putting both our minds together on this one.
Oatbong?
The real vibe coding
If YouTube’s automated subtitles are anything to go by, it’ll randomly start thinking I’m speaking Vietnamese.
I got subpoenaed once and the stenographer used one of these.
People all over the world make good livings at jobs you've never heard of, or imagined existed. Jobs that will not be done by machines anytime soon.
Maybe not though. If the biggest companies in the US are discovering AI is more expensive than paying US based employees, AI is certainly more expensive than paying employees in most other parts of the world too.
Anyone needs handmade wooden furniture?
Because that's what i'm going to be switching careers to if that trend comes to my place.
Woodworking is surprisingly popular among tech folk. It seems some hobbies just click better for techies. Bouldering is another example.
Sewing/designing clothes really clicked for me. Haven't tried woodworking, but I imagine it scratches the same itch and utilizes similar skills: 90% of sewing is just planning, calculation, and measuring. Then, watch everything just fit together into place
Exactly like programming! /s
Never hesitate to rescue wooden pallets, but don't waste gas on retrieving them either. You can use an iron railroad tie as a chisel for dismantling them
I would rather do almost anything than talk to a device, except in very specific circumstances.
I set timers and play music on a smart speaker somewhat often.
Occasionally, when I am alone, know exactly what I want to say, and my hands are full, I might dictate a text message.
But other than that, I will not be talking to my device, thanks. The human voice is primarily for talking to other humans, with all the imprecision and uncertainty and emotional resonance that entails. Keyboards are great tools designed for precise computer input, and I would like to continue to use them.
i dont think ive ever used a speach computer interface that wasnt hot garbage and misunderstood half of what i said unless i talked to it really slow like it was an idiot. pretty much every time it would have been faster to use the tactile interface. i dont even have that much of an accent compared to generic american.
Developer to LLM: I am your father!
Or, listen me out, they could work from home.
Working from home doesn't appeal to the emotional needs of fragile managers.
It doesn't appeal to the emotional needs of a bunch of my colleagues who are in the office every day voluntarily either.
Yeah, I have colleagues who choose to work in the office when work from home is available because they like the separation of work from home, don't have a good spot to work from home, are aware they would be distracted at home, prefer to see other people in person, and a bunch of other reasons. At least they get a choice!
Every day I'm a little surprised there's no news story of some workers beating their "no, you have to come into the office" manager to death. They've got means, motive, and opportunity, and it's extra funny because if they'd been allowed to work at home they wouldn't have at least two of those.
But really we're ruled by the worst of us. Cowards and fools.
Maybe unionizing is safer than hitting the decision makers with an office chair while screaming "you made this possible" until they can't even cry anymore.
Well what I'm trying to tell you is that there are probably more people than you realise who want to be in the office. My partner, and a bunch of my coworkers, hated being forced to work from home during the pandemic. So maybe that's part of the reason.
Oh, I read your thing backwards then.
I can't imagine wanting to go into the office on the regular. The commute. The lost time (can math out to like a 20% pay cut, if you spend two hours a day traveling + getting ready). The sickness. The lack of control over environment (temperature, sound).
Can't relate to it. And I'm a very social person that likes interacting with people.
I live 15 minutes from work. If I got out of bed early enough I could easily bike there (and have done so).
Really the only thing I miss from work from home is the ability to take a short break once per hour to do some bodyweight exercises or kettbell swings during lunch.
But on the flipside, it's hard for me to stay concentrated while at home. I personally get way more work done in the office.
While I believe that is true for you, I don't believe it justifies the lost time, health, and environmental damage of mandating in-office for everyone.
The office is super distracting for many people.
Why stop at feeding? Where's the penis and vagina tubes? We might as well be jorkin' it too if all the rich and powerful are.
Pleasure? I think not.
It does mention “all the other tubes”. I wonder if it will be THX 1138 style.
I hope its like a Geigeresque device that makes us sit shrimp style and cups backwards from our gooches to our mouths.
Alexa, play Spankfest 8.
How about we just get to the logical conclusion:
✨ Techbro Land ✨
Hook them up to a simulation, yes, like The Matrix! In this simulation they get to do everything they dream of.
Crypto shitcoins as far as the eye can see. Their stonks all go to the moon. Everybody is prompting Ai any time their neurons accidentally bump together. The simulation will accurately simulate an entire earth population just prompting AI and glued to their phones. Look! More profits! Wow.
Ai gambling! Ai sports! Ai art! Ai dating! Ai social media! Ai business! Ai porn! It's all here in ✨ Techbro Land ✨.
We can even accurately simulate mass misery of the general population so our little tenants feel superior! Meanwhile, the Techbro doesn't need to sleep. They believe they unlocked the code to Immortality by micro dosing various hallucinogens and stimulants, allowing them to spend 100% of their day in a chair reviewing an Ai agent's reviewing of vibe code!
There are no "regulations" or even governments in ✨ Techbro Land ✨ . There's a single AI Simulated Singularity (A.S.S) TechBroKing Fascist that makes all the memes, and punishes all the poor working consumption class. Every living situation is AirBnB. All the cars are self driving 24 ton pickups. Trains only exist to ship drones and supplies for infinite data centers and government contracts.
Computing is subscription only, games are rented by the minute, nobody owns anything.
Profits go up and up and up and up and up without end. No climate change, despite the global temperature going up 12⁰C, wars are fought daily with killer robots...I could go on.
The important thing is: These little hoodie-clad megalomanics can't even tell they're actually just locked safely away from the rest of us in stasis in a former mega data center.
...The rest of us, in the real world, take the best of our computing standards with us, and dial all the bullshit back to like 2004 and try this shit again.
I'm keeping c++11 but okay for the rest.
Did the CEOs unplug their keyboards? Wtf even is this?
Well the mask is a steno mask
Theoretically most people will speak faster than they type. You have to type around 180-200 wpm to be faster than speaking.
(I say theoretically, because usually typing speed ratings also ding you for errors, and uh, speech transcription isn’t really there, either.)
The hard part of both speech and typing is thinking about what you say. Typing nor speaking are going to change the speed I can get information into the computer.
Maybe we could ask the AI to do that thinking bit then tell us what to say.
Hey Siri, tell ChatGPT what it wants to hear to generate a million dollar code piece.
Without bugs.
...words.
But this isn't words: it's coding.
I'm faster hitting a key than I am dictating it -- there are more speakos than typos because my accent doesn't match a Bay Area accent and gets misparsed.
Next big thing: COBOL and the other 80s pseudo-english languages!
But people still won't learn SQL.
Personally, I like to dictate all my programs to the computer in APL.
I'm not really into it but one of the guys on late night linux podcast, generally resistant to LLMs and shiny new things, is a fan of speech to text for general computing, as in every input field in the OS should support speech. In a recent episode he said that he believes it to be the way of the future.
I remember
Dragon SpeechDragon Naturally Speaking saying the same thing in the 90's. It's improved, but not enough to make it useful as more than an aide for people who can't type. I do agree, that for simple accessibility, it should be integrated into every field, but I doubt it's ever going to take over.As others have noted, that it's only technically true that dictation is faster than typing. In a practical sense, there's a fair number of reasons why that's not the case, including that usually thinking about the entry is what's the slowest, and also the errors in both are typically what slows people down.
there's also the problem of, for example, keeping entries confidential. You don't want to speak your passwords where others can hear you.
I remember Dragon! And ViaVoice! I saw a presentation for ViaVoice in the late 90s and it blew my tiny mind.
It really was the future. And it’s… a bit better since then. Oh god thats like 30 years ago almost
I don't think this is true.
There's a locally hostable model called whisper that is very impressive.
My plumber uses speech to text to send text messages all day.
Late Night Linux guy says he uses it for microsoft teams quite a bit.
You're only partially correct about input speed. If you want to dictate an email then yes you need to think about each word you want to say and the order in which to say them. Coupled with an LLM that problem is diminished because you can just kind of have a conversation with the LLM and tell it to draft an email.
and how much of that conversation with an LLM is "No, what I want is..." because it assumed something; or just straight up hallucinated or the typo made it go off on a tangent?
As for whisper, I can find sources that are saying for American-English speakers in a not-noisy environment (aka the best case scenario,) the model has a word error rate between 2-8%. For reference, Dragon NaturallySpeaking had a WER of 3-5%. So I wouldn't say that Whisper has made any substantial improvements, and they're OpenAi. you can trust them if you want. I don't think that'll work out well in the long run, though.
I'd like to see the source that says Dragon's WER in the 90s was 3-5%. I used Dragon in the 2000s and it just wasn't comparable to the current state of the art.
whisper.cpp is an opensource implementation, although I'm not certain exactly how open.
when you're providing context rather than instructions the tendency for a model to hallucinate or run off on a tangent is minimal, because the context you're providing has it's own cohesion.
https://dragon-medical-transcription.com/history_speech_recognition.html, for example. a lot of adverts and awards were given to it (admittedly awards like PC Mag that were probably paid advertising... but that's why I went with Open AI's assessment on whisper at 2%.) Dragon was boasting 99% accuracy after (admittedly months) of training; and it frequently reached it. there were some gotchas in that- the months-long training was a big one. The other was that you frequently had to slow down and be careful to enunciate that you don't have to do with modern systems (including the MS versions of Dragon- they bought it out at some point)
It's on the MIT license, if that helps. I take issue with anything OpenAI is involved in. for oh-so-many reasons.
high end office headsets already have excellent isolation, wearing a muzzle is just a humiliation ritual.
how does a headset isolate their voice
Fuck if I know, all I know is you can sit next to a blender in a busy office full of crying babies and barking dogs while writing a dissertation on an electric typewriter and the person on the other end of the line would never be able to tell. Professional headsets (like in the $300-$500 range) are honestly pretty incredible. If these silicon valley offices are too noisy for a high end EOS to handle, or if they genuinely have that many people constantly talking all day to the point that it's a problem then they need to go back to the drawing board. Steno masks have their place but for anything a garden variety techbro is doing they're either performative bullshit or a lazy bandaid. I guaranfuckingtee bossman has no interest in putting one of these on.
I'm not talking about the people on the other end of the call, I'm talking about the jackass eight feet away dictating things to his imaginary friend while I'm trying to have a conversation with somebody
I think that falls under "back to the drawing board." Functionally there's little difference between talking to a model and taking a call. If management is pushing them to dictate and it's causing a problem they should put them in cubes.
I imagine it's like the Active Noise Canceling (ANC) mode of headphones which will monitor background noise and then calculate the inverse sound wave and play that sound to you which in effect mostly cancels out the background noise (works better for certain frequencies than others). For a microphone they could do the same but instead of playing you the inverse sound, they could play it through the microphone for whomever is listening.
This is such a Kafkaesque cyberpunk dystopian problem. This is needed because owners and managers want open offices for surveillance and coat cutting. They are also aware that only about half of workers thrive in those environments while the other have drops in productivity. Solution a cheap muzzle so that the workers who aren't as productive in noisy environments aren't disturbed.
Meanwhile could you imagine the smell of those things. You'd have to wash them everyday or have some kind of cover for them not to just have a permanent funk.
Wasn't that to sniff, smell, different galaxies. Still funny tho
Holy shit they're real
Save money. Get human shaped boxes with lids that they can lay down in to save energy to increase productivity!
Do people really talk to LLMs that often?
No. Either you do it to make some weird KPI go up or you work on a very simple product.
Next up: Humans are hardwiring themselves to the computers, with only the brain and a few select "most important" organs remaining of them.
It's evolution, baby
Source?
It's Do the evolution by Pearl Jam
Company-issued slop muzzles
So what is the real purpose? Surely this can't be it. Trying to solve a problem that has been solved more efficiently tons of times.
Just be like me and assume it's a shitpost until proven otherwise. If it's real then he's probably testing a specialised equipment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenomask
Lets assume AI can produce production ready code without any problems (this is what these CEOs likely believe anyway). Something that can produce thousands of lines of code per minute is not enough for these greedy fucks that now they want prompts given by speaking so that things move even faster?
I can type a lot faster than I can speak
Its not even about the speed. Typing allows me to properly get my thoughts out. If something sounds incorrect or confusing, I can always go back and change it before sending. You can't unsay words as easily.
The C-suite people got rich by (to be a little reductionist about it) telling other people what to do, and they can't imagine that everyone else wouldn't leap at the chance to do the same.
Most of them got rich by being born. Telling people what to do is just a fun pastime for them.
This is how you get Guild Navigators, you dont want that do you?
chat, is this real?
Chat are we cooked fr?
The furry mask, which was the style at the time.
"Ah, dang it, I showed up late and they're out of masks. I guess that means I'll have to use the voice-cancelling ball gag again..."
Fuck AI, but if this was something those loud public phone people could wear that would be great. Like the dude shouting into his phone on the bus, pair it with some headphones leave us in peace
Does it come with a spit valve?
A water key* is needed in wind instruments because they have long tubing that is likely to be cold enough to condense water out of breath and which hence gets trapped inside it. Not applicable here.
Instead of the tech of RecDep of 1984, we get the SlopShop.
Look at the fucking whackjob nerds. Dweebs. We need to bully the AI users into extinction. Dont fuck anyone that uses AI willingly.
Name-calling like children do isn't going to meme this better.
I forget where I read it, but apparently this is being pushed to replace or augment court stenography. Apparently, there is more demand for court recorders than stenographers to fulfill (not sure if this is true, but that’s the claim), so this option is being proposed as the AI dictation requires less training than stenography.
It's a different tool, but for much the same end. I want to say it's more because the device is cheaper than a typical stenography machine would cost, but I don't know that for sure.
I think stenographers in courts are already using them.
Stick the other end in someone's butthole and, boom, you got the e-human centipede!
So they know their products would be useless in a noisy environment? They can't pick out the voice they need like an actual human being can in a crowd (excluding some with hearing difficulties)?
Fucking idiotic.
Well, we've always known that the internet is a series of tubes.
this would be useful for when I need to talk on the phone near others without disturbing them
Chat is this real?