The obsession with conversational interfaces likely stems from two places: sci-fi and CEOs (and other executive, businessy types) who are used to ordering people around.
“Do this, do that, and read between the lines!”
An interesting/useful article, if only because I was unaware of the Mac equivalence of Launchy (Linear, Superhuman,etc). The biggest problem is that a Conversational interface could excel at certain tasks, but just using it Willy-Nilly is asking for disappointment, plus the voice recognition still needs to get better, especially with context clues, which would require more integration (watching whatever you’re watching, hearing whatever you’re hearing, what page are you looking at, etc. )
But if you’re in front of a keyboard, then directing the computer to do something has got to require less context switching then just bringing up on the keyboard. Even if it’s only 60 words a minute, if all you’re doing is typing in a handful of strokes, then it’s probably faster than coming up with all the keywords necessary to tell the computer to do it.
Quicksilver for Mac OS X was the original one of these apps AFAIR. And it appears it predates all of those (launchy, etc)
I prefer Alfred these days myself.
You can even do similar with just Spotlight on macOS and the Start Menu in Windows 10+.
Interesting article, I agree with his analysis, not sure (yet) that I agree with his conclusions. My brain needs to think about it in the background for a bit (just the way mine works).
TLDR: we should expect conversational interfaces to be an addition to the workflows we currently use.
