You're considering "talking to" a separate thing, I consider it the same as reading street signs or using object recognition. My voice or text input is just one type of input. Can other ML solutions or algorithms detect a tree (same as me telling it there is a tree,yaw to the right), yes, can LLMs detect a tree and determine what course of action to take? also true. Which is better? I don't know, but I won't be quick to dismiss anyone attempting to use LLMs.