The Case Against Conversational Interfaces

We keep telling ourselves that previous voice interfaces like Alexa or Siri didn’t succeed because the underlying AI wasn’t smart enough, but that’s only half of the story. The core problem was never the quality of the output function, but the inconvenience of the input function: A natural language prompt like “Hey Google, what’s the weather in San... See more

We spend too much time thinking about AI as a substitute (for interfaces, workflows, and jobs) and too little time about AI as a complement. Progress rarely follows a simple path of replacement. It unlocks new, previously unimaginable things rather than merely displacing what came before.

The same is true here. The future isn’t about replacing exist... See more

My favorite example of truly effortless communication is a memory I have of my grandparents. At the breakfast table, my grandmother never had to ask for the butter – my grandfather always seemed to pass it to her automatically, because after 50+ years of marriage he just sensed that she was about to ask for it. It was like they were communicating t... See more

This brings me to my core thesis: The inconvenience and inferior data transfer speeds of conversational interfaces make them an unlikely replacement for existing computing paradigms – but what if they complement them?

I admit that the title of this essay is a bit misleading (made you click though, didn’t it?). This isn’t really a case against conversational interfaces, it’s a case against zero-sum thinking.

We spend too much time thinking about AI as a substitute (for interfaces, workflows, and jobs) and too little time about AI as a complement. Progress rarely f... See more