On the drawbacks of Conversational User Interfaces (CUIs):

who would rather say “next”, “next”, “next”, than swipe around in Instagram?

Additionally to being slow and clunky, CUIs have other massive drawbacks.

They don’t scale socially. Can anyone imagine 50 people on a bus, all issuing vocal commands to their phones at the same time?

They can’t effectively provide knowledge-in-the world. Which means you have to remember all the options for Photoshop in your head, or continuously ask the bot to list them. Terribly inconvenient.

Bots are awful at precision tasks where it is harder to specify what to do verbally, rather than hapticly. Think of a digital DJing application for an extreme example. Or games. Playing Space Invaders guiding your cannon with your voice? Good luck with that!

Bots have their uses, or more exactly, they will at some point. But conversation is simply not an interaction channel for everything. That’s why you still open the door to your office with your hand, even though the technology to open it with your voice has long existed.

The fact that a chatbot-related company CEO writes without understanding these things, confirms that commercial, and not HCI considerations are driving this field at the moment.

Watch out for the incoming “trough of (bitter) disappointment”.