The case against conversational interfaces

Star Trek continues to be prescient. It not only introduced the conversational interface to the masses, it also nailed its proper uses in ways we're still (re)discovering now.

If you pay attention to how the voice interface is used in Star Trek (TNG and upwards), it's basically exactly what the article is saying - it complements manual inputs and works as a secondary channel. Nobody is trying to manually navigate the ship by voicing out specific control inputs, or in the midst of a battle, call out "computer, fire photon torpedoes" - that's what the consoles are for (and there are consoles everywhere). Voice interface is secondary - used for delegation, queries (that may be faster to say than type), casual location-independent use (lights, music; they didn't think of kitchen timers, though (then again, replicators)), brainstorming, etc.

Yes, this is a fictional show and the real reason for voice interactions was to make it a form of exposition, yadda yadda - but I'd like to think that all those people writing the script, testing it, acting and shooting it, were in perfect position to tell which voice interactions made sense and which didn't: they'd know what feels awkward or nonsensical when acting, or what comes off this way when watching it later.

I have similar thoughts on LCARS: the Doylist requirement for displays that are bold enough and large enough to feel meaningful even when viewed on a 1990-era TV, are also the requirements for real life public information displays.

At first glance it feels like real life will not benefit from labelling 90% of the glowing rectangles with numbers as the show does, but second thoughts say spreadsheets and timetables.

I remember Picard barking out commands to make the ship do preprogrammed evasion or fight maneuvers too. This seems like another good use.

Yeah, this and I think even weapons control, happened on the show. But the scenario for these cases is when the bridge is understaffed for episode-specific plot reasons, and the protagonist has to simultaneously operate systems usually handled by distinct stations. That's when you get an officer e.g. piloting the shuttle/runabout while barking out commands to manage power flow, or voice-ordering evasions while manually operating weapons, etc.

(Also worth noting is that "pre-programmed evasion patterns" are used in normal circumstances, too. "Evasive maneuver JohnDoe Alpha Three" works just as well when spoken to the helm officer as to a computer. I still don't know whether such preprogrammed maneuvers make sense in real-life setting, though.)

There was an episode where Beverly Crusher was alone on the ship, and controlled everything just by talking to the computer. I wondered why there is a bridge, much less a bridge crew. But yes it makes sense to use higher bandwidth control systems when possible.

Star trek's crews overall are chosen in a way that seems to consider redundancies, as well as meshing as a team that can offer varying viewpoints.

It runs directly counter to that more capitalistic mindset of "why don't we do more with less?" when spending years navigating all kinds of unknown situations, you want as many options as possible available.

If that was the episode where the crew disappeared with nobody else but her noticing, it doesn't really count because she was trapped in a Negative Space Wedgie pocket dimension based on her own thoughts at the time she was trapped.

In real life, even today, a lot of systems have to run fully automatically because humans are too slow to respond: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalanx_CIWS

But specifically manoeuvres, rather than weapons systems? Today, I doubt it: the ships are too slow for human brains to be the limiting factor. But if we had an impulse drive and inertial dampers (in the Trek sense rather than "shock absorbers"), then manoeuvres would also necessarily be automated.

In the board game Star Fleet Battles (based on a mix of TOS, TAS, and WW2 naval warfare), one of the (far too many*) options is "Erratic Manoeuvres", for which the lore is a combination of sudden acceleration and unpredictable changes in course.

As we live in a universe where the speed of light appears to be a fundamental limit, if we had spaceships pointing lasers at each other and those ships could perform such erratic manoeuvres as compatible with the lore of the show about how fast they can move and accelerate, performing such manoeuvres manually would be effective when the ships are separated by light seconds. But if the combatants are separated by "only" 3000 km, then it has to be fully automated because human nerve impulses from your brain to your finger are not fast enough to be useful.

* The instructions are shaped like pseudocode for a moderately complex video game, but published 10-20 years before home computers were big enough for the rule book. So it has rules for boarding parties, and the Tholian web, and minefields, and that one time in the animated series where the Klingons had a stasis field generator…

Definitely plays well with the kind of scenarios the writers throw at them - you can pretty much expect any Starfleet officer, whether a commander or an ensign, to operate any system on the ship with at least some passing competence. There's no "I work in stellar cartography, I don't know which button fires torpedoes or how to turn on the bio-bed in sick bay" on a Starfleet ship, except when uttered as a joke (or with EMHs). Overkill in real life? Perhaps. But definitely reassuring.

Hell, if someone really didn't know, they could expect "Computer, turn on the bio-bed 3" to just work - circling us back to the topic of what NLP and voice interfaces are good for.

Yes, that was it. I think though that she had a good enough understanding of the ship's capabilities that her private world would have been realistic in that respect.

Whatever understanding she had back then, "a lot has happened in the last 20 years" (30+ IRL) between then and that memorable ending of Picard S3 :).

Actually this is why Lower Decks is so neat, they hint that there are juniors who barely know anything. That might have been the one sticking negative for me growing up, was that you had to be some super smartypants to be anywhere near starfleet