I wrote an article discussing The Future of User Interfaces .. and the role of Conversational AI: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/future-conversational-crafting-next-gen-user-ai-salmen-hichri-lpw3e/ I'm curious to know what the community thinks! 🧠💡 • Do you foresee a world where chatbots and voice are the dominant user interfaces? • Or will the mouse/screen always maintain a leading role in human/machine interactions?

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.

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 ...

Another example of the discontinuity between a UX optimized for discoverability by non-experts, and one optimized for proficient use by experts. “The unreasonable effectiveness of text”

I can’t help but think of the last time chat bots were a UX paradigm receiving significant attention. This has been an ongoing cycle since Eliza. To be fair, this time it genuinely is different. It’s interesting what this article prioritizes. It talks a lot about having the context of the conversation. Which we kind of get for free now. What’s fascinating to me at the moment is how people are modifying things like ChatGPT with custom directives or domain specific GPTs. I don’t love that they’re building on a closed ecosystem (or is it _Open_AI?), but that’s another story. These customizations are more in line with UX concerns like the ones illustrated in this pre-consumer LLM article on Chat Bots: https://chatbotsmagazine.com/the-future-healthcare-and-conversational-ui-87182d9045e0 Here we have the healthcare sector and the author does mention context but spends most of her time talking about empathy and what constitutes simplicity in such an interface.