The case against conversational interfaces

> To put the writing and speaking speeds into perspective, we form thoughts at 1,000-3,000 words per minute. Natural language might be natural, but it’s a bottleneck.

We might form fleeting thoughts much faster than we can express them, but if we want to formulate thoughts clearly enough to express them to other people, I think we're close to the ~150 words per minute we can actually speak.

I recently listened to a Linguistics podcast (lingthusiasm, though I don't recall which episode) where they talked about the efficiency of different languages, and that in the end they all end up roughly the same, because it's really the thought processes that limit the amount of information you communicate, not the language production.

There is no evidence for any of that. Thoughts can form relatively quickly, but there's no way we can keep that up. Thoughts seem to stick around for a while.

And thoughts develop over time. They're often not conceived complete. That has been shown with some clever experiments.

And language production also puts a limit on our communication channel. It is probably optimized to convert communication intent into motor actions. It surely takes its time. That is not a problem for the system, since motor actions are slow. Idk where "lingthusiam" gets their ideas from, but there's psycholinguistic literature dating back to the 1920s that is often neglected by linguists.