David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@futurebird This was obviously nonsense, for the same reason most voice control is: we had prior experience with it.
Before computers were common, executives had typists who would type letters for them. Initially you’d dictate to someone who would write shorthand (at the speed of speaking) and then someone (possibly the same person) would transcribe it with a typewriter. By the ‘80s, it was common to replace this with a dictaphone that you’d speak into and then the secretary would replay the tape and be able to rewind and pause, eliminating the need for shorthand.
Once computers became useful enough that every executive had one on their desk, they learned to type and found that typing their own letters was faster than dictating. A lot of these people were sufficiently well paid that having someone to type your letters as a status symbol was perfectly viable and they still didn’t do it. A human who knows you and your style well is going to do a lot better a job than a computer, so serves as a good proxy for the perfect computerised text to speech. The people who had access to it and had an incentive to treat using it as a status symbol did not use it because it was less productive than just typing.
The only people for whom it makes a difference are those who can’t use their hands, whether as a permanent disability or something transient like having them occupied performing surgery, driving, cooking, or whatever. And there the comparison point is remembering the thing you wanted to type until later. Computers are great at things that replace the need for remembering things. As was paper before it (sorry Socrates, all the cool kids use external memory, listen to Plato).
In the ‘90s there were experiments doing the same kind of ‘simulate the perfect voice command by using a human as a proxy’ thing and they all showed that it was an improvement only when the human had a lot of agency. None of the benefit came from using natural language (using jargon or restricted command sets was usually less ambiguous) all of the benefit came from a human being able to do a load of things in response to a simple command. And you can get the same benefits without adding voice control.
Humans evolved manual dexterity long before they evolved language and have a lot of spare processing available for offloading tasks that involve hands. Try reading a piece of piano music and saying the notes in your head as fast as they’re played (you can’t say them aloud that fast, but even forming them into thoughts expressed in natural language is hard).
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