Products · Broad category
Voice assistants and voice interfaces
Raised as a usability problem by 89 people on Hacker News over 16 years (2011–2026), in 78 threads.
This is a broad category rather than one product, so its issues aren't ranked on the home page.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
- 1
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Every issue, all time, most people first
Voice input is slow, imprecise, and hard to recover from mistakesUnreviewed
20112026- Voice systems are unusable for people who stutter, varying with their stutter2025-12-03
- Hearing a list of options takes far longer than scanning it on a screen2025-11-26
- Voice assistant often mishears and repeats back instructions in agonizing back-and-forth2025-01-31
Destinations and street names are misrecognisedUnreviewed
20112026- Voice-driven phone menus are inconsistent and awkward to navigate, frustrating callers2025-12-25
- Users must yell, repeat and correct commands to be understood2024-12-20
- Voice commands frustrating to use, e.g. destinations and street names misrecognised2024-01-09
Users can't tell what the voice interface can doUnreviewed
20112026- Lip-reading voice control would be a worst-case interface that fails for many users2026-05-12
- Voice interfaces are designed to look impressive rather than to be usable2020-10-26
- Voice interfaces require specific vocabulary and fixed command order, and lag.2020-08-03
Must adopt an accent and repeat commands several timesUnreviewed
20112026- Misses commands for accented speakers, so users never know if the next command will work2021-05-24
- Has to adopt an American or English accent and repeat commands several times to be understood2018-06-08
- Needs repeated shouting before a non-standard accent is recognised2017-04-13
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Freeform speech gives no discoverability, so users can't tell what the system can do2026-10-08
- Phone AI bot blocks reaching a human, wasting the caller's time2026-09-15
- Lip-reading voice control would be a worst-case interface that fails for many users2026-05-12
- Voice-driven phone menus are inconsistent and awkward to navigate, frustrating callers2025-12-25
- Voice systems are unusable for people who stutter, varying with their stutter2025-12-03
- Hearing a list of options takes far longer than scanning it on a screen2025-11-26
- Demo is slow, and the user doesn't feel organized by it2025-06-13
- Mispronounced names, odd pauses and unusable performance in less common languages2025-05-24
- A noise like a cough stops the AI mid-reply with no easy way to resume2025-05-05
- Voice assistant often mishears and repeats back instructions in agonizing back-and-forth2025-01-31
- Speech-to-text is terrible and the voice pipeline often doesn't work2024-12-20
- Users must yell, repeat and correct commands to be understood2024-12-20
- Voice input is slow, imprecise, hard to discover, and hard to recover from mistakes2024-09-25
- Voice activation struggles with accents, dialects, and speech dysfluency, and is inaccessible2024-08-04
- Voice reads options one by one, too slow to compare restaurants or flights2024-04-24
- Reading through lists by voice is slow and cumbersome, unlike skimming a screen2024-01-11
- Voice commands frustrating to use, e.g. destinations and street names misrecognised2024-01-09
- Queuing a song next by voice takes too many hoops, forcing phone use in the car2024-01-09
- Speaking commands is slower than tapping, and users must memorize capabilities instead of seeing them on screen2023-12-18
- Voice dialing fails for non-English contact names unless the OS language is switched2023-12-13
- Voice assistant doesn't run reliably and feels like a beta feature2023-11-29
- Linear voice and chat output makes navigating decisions and menus slow2023-11-09
- Wake word fails, transcripts are wrong, and speech recognition is slow, making voice frustrating2023-11-01
- Voice assistants are buggy and annoying to use more often than not2023-10-20
- Voice commands like calling a contact get misrecognized and mapped wrongly, causing frequent mistakes2023-05-09
- Making mistakes at about 5% rate is infuriating to use day to day2023-05-09
- Music requests get either the same playlist titles or obscure remixes2023-04-28
- Complicated tasks like skills and media control are frustrating, so users give up2023-02-24
- Voice interaction is much slower than visual interfaces for information and shopping tasks2023-02-06
- Voice is serial, slow to discover, and gives no visible history or layout2023-01-27
- Voice input is less reliable and imprecise, forcing users to guess whether the machine understood2023-01-08
- Responds 'you can't do that' or 'I don't understand' too often for voice input2022-11-25
- Voice commands may silently fail or misset, and users only discover it later2022-11-23
- Voice must list choices one at a time, so many options take too long to get through2022-11-23
- Users can't tell which spoken phrasing works, and the syntax constraints aren't explained2022-11-23
- Assistants respond slowly, miss the wake word, and can't be interrupted to correct them2022-11-23
- Failed hotwords, shifting syntax, wrong device answering, and slow responses frustrate users2022-11-23
- Must learn fixed phrasings, and the occasional misrecognition is annoying enough to abandon voice2022-11-14
- Voice assistants fail simple driving questions that a person could answer easily2022-05-30
- Voice control is hit and miss for complicated tasks like podcasts and phone control2022-05-30
- Must memorize exact phrases; assistant rejects anything slightly different and mishears addresses2022-05-25
- Listening to several bad results one by one wastes time and frustrates2021-06-17
- Misses commands for accented speakers, so users never know if the next command will work2021-05-24
- Voice commands are so frustrating to use that the commenter avoids them2021-02-26
- Natural language voice interfaces force users to guess at commands instead of looking them up2021-02-17
- Voice interfaces are designed to look impressive rather than to be usable2020-10-26
- Users must remember what voice commands exist, which is hard to discover2020-10-26
- Voice interaction has low information bandwidth and no easy way to review or correct2020-08-30
- Voice interfaces require specific vocabulary and fixed command order, and lag.2020-08-03
- Users can't tell which voice commands or device names are valid, so requests miss2020-08-01