The only surprising thing here really is that Swift isn't worth substantially more. She's been the top pop music act for a decade now and has been uncommonly business savvy so I was really expecting that figure to be at least the double.

"pervasive, useful and inspirational"

Please provide some examples because I've obviously missed a lot of actually good Voice / Audio based UIs. All I've seen are incessant attempts to market something as the future that in reality at best is mildly helpful, normally annoying and forces you to resort to other interfaces, like your phone, and at worst are glaring privacy and security issues.

Every friend I have that buy into stuff like the Google "smart" speakers, Amazon Alexa etc are initially wowed and then it's relegated to playing music and some small task, nothing like they revolution they envisioned and in general just plain worse than a normal GUI.

What's even worse is that I feel it's regressing. Google Assistant in particular is worse now than 2 years ago, I blame this on too many features being added and they make it hard for the assistant to make a good guess of which tool/feature to use. I guess that is why they cleaned some out recently.

And if you think I'm just some one shitting on stuff that I personally don't enjoy then please know I've tinkered with this stuff extensively. I built my own personal voice based assistant that I integrated with Home Assistant to control lights, lock the door and check the humidity in the lizard terrarium. It's a tricky problem and in the end I came to the realization that even if I got it "perfect" for me it still wouldn't ever be all that useful. One thing I did that very few do is build a more conversational usage model. Typical interaction:

Me: Snips? Snips: Yes? Me: Can you turn the lights to 50% Snips: Absolutely, all lights or just one room? Me: Just the livingroom Snips: Done, anything else?

Thing is that it will always work poorly in a situation with multiple people around talking. It will always be a bit awkward talking to something incorporeal. And it will always be a computer there in the other end. Conversation and the medium of voice was built and designed for human interaction and a computer can't provide that. A conversation is so extremely based on context and it becomes hard and forced to always be mindful to provide the full context. And while you can add tech to help, like say presence sensors to note that you are in the living room and thus ask "just in the living room, all lights or some other room?" Or just assume, its still not going to give us a speaking partner like Jarvis for a very, very long time. And even then I wonder what the point would be? By the time we have AI at that level, being able to do proper inference to deduce context and intent, we're going to have neural interfaces and that is VASTLY more efficient and interesting. To have access to information directly in your thoughts and to control and interact with your environment in a completely seemless manner. I just don't see Voice UI as more than a stepping stone with very little intrinsic value outside academia and challenging conventions in the UI space.

Excuse me but 'voice UI' is a hell of a lot more retro futuristic than XR. That shit has been around in sci-fi for 60+ years easy and in real life for decades at this point and is still absolutely horrible to use for just about anything more complex than setting a timer and adding things to a list.

Hmm. Superman and Spiderman do have a catalog of stories in which they've got relationships. Unsure about Batman though.

I feel like a tween with embarrassing parents when it comes to the human race. "I'm not with them!!!" Is what I'll scream when the aliens come...

I haven't seen that in stores or online but also haven't looked. Should be possible to make i feel with the evolution of bioplastics.

An alternative is paper lanterns. I've seen versions that at least claim they're safe in that they can't start a forest fire. With the Chinese New Year coming up they should be easy to find.

Sounds like the average lemming! One of us!

Fire ze missiles!

It was fucking Amazing

Well, feel like I could quite easily become a very famous stage magician a la "The Prestige" which would help make me rich while letting me keep the pocket dimension thing hidden in plain sight so to speak.

But my mind, as always, races to the limits more so than the possibilities. What would happen if I bring in more stuff than would fit? Say I bring in a decimeter cubed of concrete over and over until I no longer fit inside the cube if I'm allowed the concrete with me in? What if teleport in while driving? Does the car come with even though it doesn't fit? And if I return to the spot I entered does that mean I'll plopp out on the highway while my car is wrecked a ways down the road or inside my mangled car? What if the space i entered from is occupied or otherwise lethal?

What if I teleport in while under water? The void i leave in such an instantaneous fashion would behave quite interestingly if I did it at great depth.

I absolutely love this style of blogposts! Thanks for sharing!

Yeah, I was just confused about the direction/flow he was asking for. He clarified and his use case is fully solvable. Just not something I've personally dabbled in since he wants it for non http traffic.