I remember some car rental system switched from having you enter your confirmation number on the keypad to voice recognition.

I'm most likely to use this system in a busy airport. After enough times of it not understanding me, it finally put me on hold for half an hour for me to read the number to a person. Something that took me less than a minute previously now was super frustrating.

I must not have been the only person this affected because they added back in the option to use touch tone.

> I know what I want and how to tell it to a machine.

Yeah, Google search is not that great when you want to do conditional search in a topic with many false positives. For example I want to find a light electric scooter, under 10Kg of weight. Google will happily report all the pages that contain scooter and kg, but the kg would be for the max weight of the person, not the scooter itself. How do I tell it that in keywordese?

Actually I feel like Google is the one such service that is approaching natural language usability for general topic queries. It seems to me to be able to extract basic meaning from simple English phrases and search that sentiment. Whereas search phrases containing negatives ("not", "isn't") used to be futile, Google now correctly infers your meaning.

But yes, for parametric search I think I would always prefer a direct interface. It makes clear what is indexed and what isn't.

Altavista had the "near" operator.

Google has the "AROUND" operator, though I haven't tried it recently to see if it is still respected.

You probably don't like speaking to robots because they're currently terrible. Fixing that obviously has far more of an upside than just not trying.

Maybe, but can I please not be forced to do business via the robots while they are terrible?

Also, beside being spectacularly good, the AI has to also be actually empowered for me not to find the process wasteful and insulting. The AI should actually be able to solve my problem as a result of natural language communication. Not just walk me through a prepared script: that's frustrating even when a real live human does it.

Except that I, too, would rather book an appointment with a date picker than talk to anyone, much less a machine programmed to act like a person. It's like in order to make coffee, getting in my car and driving around the block ten times, parking in front of my house and going in to make coffee, vs just MAKING COFFEE, without doing a bunch of time wasting fluff first.

This might be an age thing because I was like that when I was younger. I didn't understand why I had to keep interacting with seemingly pointless humans in service industries everywhere. But now I'm older, I find talking is more comfortable than using a computer. I don't quite know why. Maybe speaking to a human is something we're biologically built for and these other modes of interaction are a little extra taxing on the brain even if they appear simpler. They involve reading and writing which every school kid knows is harder work than talking.

Or maybe it's just that so many computer interactions are actually slow and frustrating. Ever tried ordering at McDonalds using the touch-screen machines? It's aggravatingly tedious and complicated. There's no "take my money and go away" button. You have to navigate your way through a bunch of stupid menus trying to up-sell you, and each one has an unforgivable loading time.