Thanks for sharing this, it was a really interesting read.

To your questions, I’d love your insights from thinking in the space.

My take is that it’ll never be either one or the other, but probably a big mix of both — as is I and I’d wager many folks talk a lot at work, just not to computers. It is during conversations with other people. Generally, that talking leads to mouse and keyboard stuff.

To me, conversational interfaces are less about a novel input method and more about shifting a mode of collaboration — when you can talk with a computer it becomes less of a tool to use to complete some work, and more of a collaborator in that task.

conversational UX is inherently 1D so generally less efficient if the search space is small and the classification scheme relatively obvious to the audience.

Additionally, when done via voice/response, it's inherently public, which is usually a detriment rather than a feature.

Lastly, people generally expect a conversational reply in a shorter time than other UI feedback, so it feels slower even if it isn't.

that being said, I think the current generation is very good at rewording to optimize for both a goal tone and easily measurable outcome like response tone or action taken (though the outcome part can be a monkey's paw situation so requires supervision)

One thought on the "integrated AI companion": Coding assistants may have been low hanging fruit, because it's relatively easy to extract context to provide to the AI system. For other systems, I suspect event-driven architectures may become more popular: they may allow for building that context on-the-fly to provide to the AI.

if you can mine github for it, it's in a coding assistant today; otherwise the amount of labelled training data you need is pretty massive (let alone copy/paste and stackoverflow bias). Having a ton of event data helps, but unless there's some clever way to autolabel, 🤷

I agree that conversational interfaces are not relevant for everything (the 1D aspect @Don Abrams ) .. Text or voice won't replace the efficiency of visual data formats like charts or tables ...

They can replace complex menus though .. I find it easier to type a command in natural language through an AI assistant to perform a task, rather than trying to figure out how to do it myself via a complex UI ... but when I'm using a familiar tool with shortcuts and customised UI, I can simply use keyboard shortcuts ..