Watch: Meta's Voice-Activated Builder Bot Reeks of the Sci-Fi UI Fallacy

Here's Meta's latest Metaverse technology announcements dealing with AI solutions. To no one's surprise, the company is fully open about their plans to leverage highly personal data of what people see how and they use their bodies while in their metaverse platform. (A coming crisis people like Avi Bar-Zeev have been screaming about for years.)

What's somewhat surprising (at least to me) is the company's voice-controlled Builder Bot prototype. (Watch above at around 3:10 minutes in.) It painfully, cringefully has all the markings of the sci-fi UI fallacy:

Basically, that's the fallacy of assuming the presentation of a future technology in a popular sci-fi film/TV show is the most appealing model for a real world version of a similar product. As my colleague and pal Amber Case wrote:

Since at least the first Star Trek series, it’s been a standard trope: In the future, we’ll simply speak out loud to an “intelligent” agent that would instantly understand our vocal patterns the moment we express them.

Cinematically, this technology makes a lot of sense: It’s more interesting and narratively efficient to watch Tony Stark solve technical problems while pacing in his lab and talking to Jarvis, as opposed to watching him sit silently at a desk, typing into a computer.

But that does not mean voice-controlled interfaces are always a feasible real-life solution. Unlike in a movie, in which dozens of crew members tightly control and modify the audio of every scene, we usually live and work in places full of noise that can easily confuse voice activation. 

Builder Bot's specific voice-activated system seriously seems modeled after the Holodeck from Star Trek: TNG. But putting aside whether people even want to talk at length to a computer, it misses how much weaker a voice-driven system with limited options is, compared to what we already have.

Or to put it another way: The average dedicated consumer can already create a highly customized beach (or whatever) scene through the simple but powerful icon-driven UI of The Sims games, so how is Builder Bot better?

Comments

[Jean D'Oh]

I don't know what your problem with voice-driven building is. You're comfortable with 3rd person perspective mouse+keyboard construction, you do that. The Average Jo is never going to learn that. But they can build an infinite amount of space easily by describing it. Will it be as 'good' as traditional methods? Maybe, maybe not. Should that stop it from existing? No.