The case against conversational interfaces

> If you have a team of senior, experienced and bright engineers, you can with a few words point out a desire and, trust them to ask for information when there is relevant ambiguity, and expect a good outcome

It's such a fallacy. First thing an experienced and bright engineer will tell you is to leave the premises with your "few words about a desire" and not return without actual specs and requirements formalized in some way. If you do not understand what you want yourself, it means hours/days/weeks/months/literally years of back and forths and broken solutions and wasted time, because natural language is slow and lossy af (the article hits the nail on the head on this one).

Re "ask for information", my favorite example is when you say one thing if I ask you today and then you reply something else (maybe the opposite, it happened) if I ask you a week later because you forgot or just changed your mind. I bet a conversational interface will deal with this just fine /s

I can't zoom in to your website on my phone without an email subscription prompt blocking the screen that I can't easily close, and each new zoom in or out repeats it.

Also, unless I'm missing something, the app is called TabTabTab while its only feature is copy & paste? Tabbing doesn't seem to be mentioned at all. I'm guessing tabbing is involved but there doesn't seem to be a word about it except from users referencing it in the reviews. It seems to only bill itself as "magic copy-paste".

Two key things that make computers useful, specificity and exactitude, are thrown out of the window by interposing NLP between the person and the computer.

I don't get it at all.

WPM and other attempts at putting a one specific number/metric to point to is imo only mudding the waters. Better way to think about just how awfully slow natural language (on average) is as an interface is to think about interactions with {whatever} in terms of *intents* and *actions*.

Comparing "What's the weather in London" with clicking the weather app icon is misleading and too simplistic. When people imagine a future driven by conversational interfaces, they usually picture use cases like:

1. "When is my next train leaving?"

2. "Show me my photos from the vacation in Italy with yellow flowers on them"

3. "Book a flight from New York to Zurich on {dates}"

...

And a way to highlight what's faster/less-noisy is to compare how natural language vs. mouse/touch maps onto the Intent -> Action. The thing is that interactions like these are generally so much more complex. E.g. Does the machine know what 'my' train is? If it doesn't, can it offer reasonable disambiguation? If it can't, what then? And does it present the information in a way where the next likely action is reachable, or will I need to converse about it?

You could picture a long table listing similar use cases in different contexts and compare various input methods and modalities and their speed. Flicking a finger on a 2d surface or using a mouse and a keyboard is going to be — on average — much faster and with less dead-ends.

Conversational interfaces are not the future. Imo even in the sense of 'augmenting', it's not going to happen. Natural-language driven interface will always play the role of a supporting (still important, though!) role. An accessibility aid when e.g. temporarily, permanently, or contextually not able to use the primary input method to 'encode your intent'.

Do you know of a foldable model that that can be used while walking?