alt Hacker NewsI agree but its becoming increasingly clear that "chatbot-as-the-CLI" is likely a "worse is better" situation. It's clearly crappier and slower than just hitting a button, but everyone knows what they want and they know how to put it into text. CLIs in the past never could cope because they relied on exacting, esoteric syntax, so mere mortals had to learn a lot about how to translate what they want "Send a copy of this photo to my friend Sally". So a button is abstracted that says "Send" and "Attach" and some file-based metaphor is built up to allow the work to map better to what people know and understand and can intuit.
My mom can't find the button in the GUI though, and odds are it would be buried in menus she'd get lost in. She can type "Send Sally this picture" into a box and hit go. Anyone literate can.
One thing that's been really useful for many years is the Help menu in MacOS. You click it and start typing the command you are looking for, and MacOS conveniently opens the menu and any submenus and shows you the command with a big blue arrow. Wouldn't this be easy to pair with a simple AI, so that people can more freely type what they want to do? Maybe even make it Spotlight accessible.
I like the visual and thus get along much better with drag-and-drop than any text based interface. So for me (and maybe your mom) the best solution would be that Sally was a window you could open and drag things to. Surprised that Apple and nobody else ever did this on desktop. At least on iOS, your friends are pictures that appear whenever you press share, but it's not perfect.