Roughly half of people in most developed countries are not functionally articulate: meaning, they can read functionally, but struggle to articulate what they want with the written word.
LLM-based chatbots can be extremely attractive to the top 30% literacy users in the developed world. They are not a good universal UI. You still need to provide pathways for the user to follow to get done what they need without forcing them to articulate their requirement.
This is why so many people sit in front of a ChatGPT-like service and say, "what would I use this for?" and never use it again.
> Roughly half of people in most developed countries are not functionally articulate
Where did you get this idea? I found this article (https://www.uxtigers.com/post/ai-articulation-barrier, is this you?), but it makes a leap from literacy to articulacy that I don't understand. It's not obvious to me why an illiterate person would be "functionally inarticulate" assuming they can speak instead of write.
Also, I'm not certain but I think the author is underestimating the abilities of a person with Level 2 literacy. It doesn't seem correct to say that "level 3 is the first level to represent the ability to truly read and work with text", especially when the whole point of LLMs is that you don't have to read a long static document and understand it, you can have a conversation and ask for something to be rephrased or ask followup questions.
I do however run a company that employs lots of blue collar, non-college-educated people, in manufacturing. And although this is in no way scientific, my experience matches this: most people are much more uncomfortable writing than they are reading. Even with reading, most strongly resist reading documentation unless they have to, and prefer trial and erroring their own gut instinct until they happen to find something that works or they give up. (This is less true of the most highly skilled technicians, such as those who troubleshoot robots and low voltage control systems.) The official statistics on literacy are absolutely not a good indicator of how comfortable people are articulating themselves with the written word, much less reading.
This is generally met with disbelief by most people in tech I talk with about this, because for the most part they have nearly zero interaction with this large portion of the population. From their daily experience, 98%+ people can make effective use of these tools.
But almost nobody in this partially literate population wants to write in an empty text box to ask an AI to do things. They can learn to visually navigate a simple UI, especially if it's well-designed, because they can effectively make decisions about what of several paths to take.
Some others here have brought up voice, and I do agree that voice is a more promising avenue, although I think it'll still take carefully constructed conversational experiences to work well (i.e., free form 'tell it what you want' will still not work).
This isn't true. There's plenty of people who are verbally fine but can't read or write. Spoken language is a far more common and fundamental skill than reading or writing.
I am surprised about the amount of resistance this is getting. Yes, some people talk more than they write. Yes, some people can't write but they can talk. But, that's just the environment the words travel through. The words themselves, they will be the same. I conceptualize expressing in writing as more lenient than communicating verbally. Verbal communication leaves much less time to ponder your ideas and pick your words carefully, thus, it's harder. I maintain my stance, if you can put words to paper (and the vast majority of people in the first world can do that) but are unable to communicate your ideas this way, you probably will fail doing so verbally as well.
If my supposition (Speculation? Stronger than it should assertion?) Is true then just interpreting requests verbally will not help
Ha. Can you imagine an AI speaking in colloquial Black American or Appalachian dialect? People's minds would short circuit, not knowing whether to be offended or approving.
That sounds super false to me, at least given how articulate kids can be before they can read, and how literate they can be before they can write.
If it's really true that half of the population can't functionally express themselves verbally then I'd sure like to know that. Or maybe I've misinterpreted something claimed here, because I'm struggling to find these claims plausible.
I mean to say that if you can write and are unable to express your ideas, you probably won't be able to do so verbally either.
In the case of kids, of course, that's true, but just because they can't write.
But if you can (and most people can) just having the option of voice input won't help.
I refrain to take a stance about how much of the population is unable to articulate thoughts in writing, (it's probably not great though) but it's probably going to be comparable with how many can't express themselves verbally as well.
I'm talking here about more complex ideas of course. I'm sure average communication is functional.
...do you know that illiterate people exist, right? Do you understand that people were illiterate for thousands of years and still managed to speak their ideas, right?
Yup, poster seems to be completely ignorant of pre-written word civilizations which used oral means to transfer knowledge through successive generations for millennia.
LLM-based chatbots can be extremely attractive to the top 30% literacy users in the developed world. They are not a good universal UI. You still need to provide pathways for the user to follow to get done what they need without forcing them to articulate their requirement.
This is why so many people sit in front of a ChatGPT-like service and say, "what would I use this for?" and never use it again.