I can tell you having been responsible for the aspects of a TINY scale in comparison button, about 30,000 units a year, that buttons are fucking hard man! It's so much harder to make a button than an entire PCB. You wouldn't think so, but you need to be GOOD at injection molding, stresses, DFM (design for manufacturing), cost analysis, generally know ALL the options to produce something, production tolerances and more just to talk to the actual experts in those fields.
Other poster is correct, it's a big deal, and it's why screens have replaced buttons in cars. It's so much cheaper to make a screen. Which is funny because as an EE, I judge a new vehicle first by how many buttons they still have.
As an electronics hobbyist who operates at an even smaller scale (where the cost of a pushbutton itself is trivial), I could not agree more strongly with this. Physical buttons are, counterintuitively, an absolutely massive pain in the butt from a design point of view. I tend to use touch sensitive pads instead. It makes the firmware more complex but the physical design so much simpler.
There is no doubt AI won't be used to fix the fully voiced issue. That is such a no-brainer.
As to graphics, my favorite games of the past 5 years were average graphics at best. (Subnautica, Outer Wilds, Hollow Knight, Hades... Red Dead 2 ok not that one)
I'm holding out on that one until I see it work. AI voices have certainly reached the point where I don't mind listening to them for a good period of time, and they can match the basic contours of someone's voice, but at the moment they are still missing precisely the fine details a game needs from a voice actor. And I don't know if this is just a matter of a few last tweaks or if it's a case of the last 10% taking 90% of the work. I'm not saying it's impossible, just that I'm waiting until I see it before I declare that it's here.
Personally I've nearly entirely bowed out of AAA gaming. The harder they push the graphics the more everything else ends up trashed. It isn't even a lack of effort per se. It's just that if literally everything has to have pristine animations and perfect voice acting and physics-based interactions with its environments, you get less than when all you needed was a 5 frame pixel animation and a funny sound effect for some particular interaction. AI can only cut into the problem there but not solve it until it is essentially not only human-capable, but human-capable in realtime, which is literally getting to holodeck levels of computation.
AI for voices is such a catch-22. On one hand, you don't want to open that box of pandora and/or alienate human VAs. OTOH, if the choice is between no VO, and AI VO, well, I'd be ok with AI VO, but it's a slippery slope for sure.
Not sure if you're being snark, like referring to your office at work, but we did this and it works pretty well. We ran the cables along the edges of wall/floor using little cable clamps. They're pretty much out of sight and it works great. Depending on your house you could also run them through the walls/attic/etc. There's a lot of ways to make it work without going bachelor pad.
Do you have a smart TV or can you fit a streaming device or mini PC into your setup? If so, Steam Remote Play might fit the bill: https://store.steampowered.com/remoteplay
Steam used to sell a device called Steam Link for this very purpose, but now they just release apps for common platforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link
I've always been surprised by the lack of cable tracking options in home electronics stores. Some installations can be done with a drill and a box knife.
It's barely limping along. URLs with underscores get broken (with an extra backslash) when posted from certain apps but only for old.reddit users. There's some kind of inline images that just says "image" that you have to click on to see. There are some kind of emojis or something that only show up as digits between colons. People talk about profile pictures that I don't see. Sometimes the zooming keeps zooming back out when you're trying to zoom in, and if you follow a link and go back, it will automatically scroll you somewhere else on the page besides where you left off.
>the only informational resource on the web that's still unscathed is Wikipedia
Ask a conservative about that opinion. Do it before you do exactly what I'm accusing you of and downvoting the bad man who said the thing against "your side".
EDIT: Yea, thanks for the gaslighting but Wikipedia's organized effort to remove conservative editors to shift a left bias in the content is well documented. I'm the crazy one injecting politics into "fair and unbiased wikipedia" lol
Injecting right/left politics into everything is so tired. I hope one day you realize how silly and artificial it is.
Stop letting people who benefit from civil strife convince you that we always have to fight each other.
Wikipedia censors leftist content, too (in favor of "centrist", US State Department positions). Part of the problem is that their definition of neutral point of view is pegged to the editorial biases of the papers of record, which through a combination of corporate ownership and "access journalism" converge on a particular world-view, that of neoliberalism.
Other poster is correct, it's a big deal, and it's why screens have replaced buttons in cars. It's so much cheaper to make a screen. Which is funny because as an EE, I judge a new vehicle first by how many buttons they still have.