There was a scifi story where people on a particular space station used a whistle-based UI, where you would whistle a pattern of tones at the computer and it would beep back.

I'd go for one of those.

So, in essence you want a language that will tell the AI what to do? A programming language, if I may say so?

It's almost if that natural language thing is highly ambiguous which is why we needed to create a new grammar to give precise instructions for machine-driven processes.

Nope, no AI, no NLP. Being so in love with that stuff is why everything is so disappointing now. I’d like a pure speech to text mode where I must get the syntax correct, or the system rejects the command. Eg I must say “set a four minute timer”, not “timer for four minutes”.

Yeah. I wouldn't even mind learning weird syntax or grammar, like

Thread.sleep(5 * 60 * 1000); light.off();

This is basically what iOS shortcuts is hoping to be. You can do some simple coding with widgets like that and then you can invoke your shortcut like `hey siri, <shortcut>`.

Avoids reciting the steps you want and gives you reliability, but I suppose requires any 'variables' to be hardcoded (or for you to create multiple instances)