The case against conversational interfaces

This right here is probably my single biggest complaint with modern computing. It's a phenomenon I've taken to calling, in daily life, "tools trying to be too damn smart for their own good". I detest it. I despise it. Many of the evils of the modern state of tech--algorithmic feeds, targeted advertising, outwardly user-hostile software that goes incredible lengths to kneecap your own ability to choose how to use it--so, so much of it boils down to tools, things that should be extensions of their users' wills, being designed to "think" they know better what the user wants to do than the users themselves. I do not want my software, designed more often than not by companies with adversarial ulterior motives, to attempt to decide for me what I meant to watch, to listen to, to type, to use, to do. It flies in the face of the function of a tool, it robs people of agency, and above all else it's frankly just plain annoying having to constantly correct and work around these assumptions made based on spherical users in frictionless vacuums and tuned for either the lowest common denominator or whatever most effectively boosts some handful of corporate metrics-cum-goals (usually both). I want my computer to do what I tell it to, not what it (or rather, some bunch of brainworm-infested parasites on society locked in a boardroom) thinks I want to do. I can make exceptions for safety-critical applications. I do not begrudge my computer for requiring additional confirmation to rm -rf root, or my phone for lowering my volume when I have it set stupidly loud, or my car for having overly-sensitive emergency stop or adaptive cruise functions. These cases also all, crucially, have manual overrides. I can add --no-preserve-root, crank my volume right back up, and turn off cruise control and control my speed with the pedals. Forced security updates I only begrudge for their tendency to serve as a justification or cover for shipping anti-features alongside. Autocorrecting the word "fuck" out of my vocabulary, auto-suggesting niche music out of my listening, and auto-burying posts from my friends who don't play the game out of my communications are not safety-critical. Let computers be computers. Let them do what I ask of them. Let me make the effort of telling them what that is. Is that so much to ask>

Honestly that just says that the interface is too low level. Telling a car to drive you to some place and make it fast is how we interact with taxi drivers. It works fine as a concept, it just needs a higher level of abstraction that isn't there yet.

Speaking and pronouncing words feels like more effort and requires more attention than typing on my keyboard or moving the mouse.

You're onto something. We've learned to make computers and electronic devices feel like extensions of ourselves. We move our bodies and they do what we expect. Having to switch now to using our voice breaks that connection. Its no longer an extension of ourselves but a thing we interact with.

What if apps published a declarative interface for context specific commands? Conversational interfaces would glue together spoken instructions with sensible matches from the set of available contextual interfaces.