Awkward or Natural

Hacker Kevin Mitnick, in his book, Ghost in the Wires, describes the time when he asked an operator in the company he was hacking into to type the following command:

spawn /nowait/nolog/nonotify/input=ttg4:/output=ttg4

Did the operator key in the command?

“Because she wasn’t keying in usernames or passwords, she didn’t think anything about what I was asking her.”

Little did she know what the command was doing for the hacker…

Over time, we’ve moved from such cryptic commands that were grammar Nazis (only exact syntax was accepted) to GUI/mouse to touch and now voice based interactions with computers.

In voice, which is better? There are only two contenders, Alexa and Google Assistant (I base that on the extremely unscientific criteria of who has ads for such products). I thought kids didn’t care about this mortal combat between Google and Amazon, until I had this conversation with my 7 yo daughter after she saw the Google Home ad:

She: “Alexa is better.”

Me: “How is it better?”

She: “With Alexa, you just start by saying, ‘Alexa, do this’. But with Google, one has to say, ‘OK, Google’. That’s a weird way of addressing somebody.”

Is there a generational gap here? Awkward ways of addressing like “OK, Google” don’t even register for me since they’re such an improvement over the “cryptic commands” era I grew up in. For today’s kids though, the “naturalness” of interacting with computers needs to be perfect.

It turns out today’s consumers share my daughter’s view. I saw this when I was going through this article comparing the two voice assistants. A key differentiator as per the article?

“Alexa is ahead in a trite but – unfortunately – important way. Alexa’s ‘wake word’, which is what you say to make a smart speaker start listening, is less of a mouthful than Google’s. “Alexa” is simply easier to say than “OK, Google”, which is a vowel salad.”

I guess when it comes to evaluating tech products, my daughter is already ahead of me…