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Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it

“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

202 comments
  • let’s rewrite the entire operating system around AI

    This should be the headline.

    Then everyone can make up their minds about whether or not to stay with Microsoft or finally move on.

  • 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.

  • 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.

      • @sugarinyourtea @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.

      • When I watch Iron Man or Batman talking to a computer, I don’t see some pinnacle of efficiency, I see inefficiency.

        Things like Jarvis from Iron Man are far beyond of just translating speech to computer commands. Like in the first Iron Man where Jarvis pretty much manages the whole process on manufacturing the suit and can autonomically manage a fleet of them. I could see benefit if some kind of AI could just listen on a engineers discussion and update CAD models based on that, taking care of that the assemblies work as they should, keeping everything in spec and managing all the documents accordingly. But that's pretty much human-level AI at that point and specially the current LLM hype is fundamentally very different from it.

  • Microsoft:

    Your computer?

    No.

    Our computer.

    That you pay for the hardware for, that you pay regular rent to use in any way, that we use for anything we want, at any time, that must be always online to function.

    Innovation.

    EDIT:

    I've said it before, Windows is going to end up as a Corpo ONLY OS, for orgs and people who cannot escape their vendor lock-in trap.

    No sane, moderately knowledgeable/informed person would willingly choose to start with a home or business setup oriented around Windows, unless there truly is something that only works on Windows that they for some reason need and cannot use an alternative.

    Their entire business model is complex, opaque cost shifting and 'gradual' enshittification within their rent-based ecosystem lock-in.

    GTFO as soon as you can, as a person or business or whatever, this will only keep getting worse.

  • The vision of an AI PC, where it may or may not launch the app you tell it to, where one plus one may or may not be two, where deleting a file may delete the file you see, or a random different one.

    Sounds great! /s

    Imagine the cost of cloud AI on PCs. That only works too some degree for cloud data and being even more wasteful for the rest.

    Every document you have, legal and medical, finance and personal, will all interface with the cloud. With numerous parties en route, visible and hidden, and a massive system you may or may not trust.

  • 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.

  • Then it's a good thing it's been a very long time since I last had to care about what Microsoft wants me to do with my computers.

202 comments