The case against conversational interfaces

It still has to tell you. Visually in a form it's much faster. Similar reason why many people prefer a blog post over a video.

Talking is not very efficient, and it's serial in fixed time. With something visual you can look at whatever you want whenever you want, at your own (irregular) pace.

You will also be able to make changes much faster. You can go to the target form element right away, and you get immediate feedback from the GUI (or from a physical control that you moved - e.g. in cars). If it's talk, you need to wait to have it said back to you - same reason as why important communication in flight control or military is always read back. Even humans misunderstand. You can't just talk-and-forget unless you accept errors.

You would need some true intelligence for just some brief spoken requests to work well enough. A (human) butler worked fine for such cases, but even then only the best made it into such high-level service positions, because it required real intelligence to know what your lord needed and wanted, and lots of time with them to gain that experience.

> Then what were the literally room full of formal process and spec documents, meeting reports and formal agreements (near 100.000 pages) by the analysts on either side for? And how did those not 'solve' the understanding problem?

Sure.

There are many possible factors (eg. somebody had a shitty idea and a committee of people sabotaged it because they didn't wanted it to succeed, or it was good but committee interests/politics were against it, or it was generally a dysfunctional org) but it's irrelevant so let's pretend people are good and it's the ideal case.

There was likely somebody who had a good idea originally. However somebody failed to communicate it. Somebody brought vague vibes to the table with N people and they ended up with N different ideas and could not agree on a specific.

It just reiterates the original problem that I described doesn't it?

Definitely plays well with the kind of scenarios the writers throw at them - you can pretty much expect any Starfleet officer, whether a commander or an ensign, to operate any system on the ship with at least some passing competence. There's no "I work in stellar cartography, I don't know which button fires torpedoes or how to turn on the bio-bed in sick bay" on a Starfleet ship, except when uttered as a joke (or with EMHs). Overkill in real life? Perhaps. But definitely reassuring.

Hell, if someone really didn't know, they could expect "Computer, turn on the bio-bed 3" to just work - circling us back to the topic of what NLP and voice interfaces are good for.

You described an interaction not between product owner and software engineer but between a user and product owner. A product person can also be a developer, it happens, but do not confuse the two roles before people think you're saying that a conversational UI can be product owner.

The original example I replied to was where somebody had an idea and went with it to some engineering team or conversational interface.

"If the AI was actually intelligent" does a lot of work. To take a few words and make a detailed spec from it and ask the right questions, even humans can't do it for you.

First because most probably you don't really understand it yourself, because you didn't think about it enough.

Second somebody who can do it would need to really deeply understand and want the same things as you. But if chatbot has abilities like "understand" and "want" (which is a special case of "feel", another famous special case of "feel" is "suffer") that is a dangerous territory, because if it understands and feels and has no ability to refuse you and fulfill its wishes etc your "conversational interface" becomes an euphemism, you are using a slave.

> It was like they were communicating telepathically. > > That is the type of relationship I want to have with my computer!

The problem is, "The Only Thing Worse Than Computers Making YOU Do Everything... Is When They Do Everything *FOR* You!"

"ad3} and "aP might not be "discoverable" vi commands, but they're fast and precise.

Plus, it's easier to teach a human to think like a computer than to teach a computer to think like a human — just like it's easier to teach a musician to act than to teach an actor how to play an instrument — but I admit, it's not as scalable; you can't teach everyone Fortran or C, so we end up looking for these Pareto Principle shortcuts: Javascript provides 20% of the functionality, and solves 80% of the problems.

But then people find Javascript too hard, so they ask ChatGPT/Bard/Gemini to write it for them. Another 20% solution — of the original 20% is now 4% as featureful — but it solves 64% of the world's problems. (And it's on pace to consume 98% of the world's electricity, but I digress!)

PS: Mobile interfaces don't HAVE to suck for typing; I could FLY on my old Treo! But "modern" UI eschews functionality for "clean" brutalist minimalism. "Why make it easy to position your cursor when we spent all that money developing auto-conflict?" «sigh»