Langridge: No UI is some UI

At his blog, Stuart Langridge takesissue with a recent Mediumpost by Tony Aubi(C) titled No UI is the New UI. Aubi(C)'spremise is that "invisible" applications-those that usetext-messaging or voice-recognition rather than on-screeninterfaces-are the future of UI design. Langridge, however,contends that "until very recently, and honestly pretty muchstill, a computer can't understand the nuance of language. So 'uselanguage to control computers' meant 'learn the computer's language',not 'the computer learns yours'." More to the point,"understanding you is laughably incomplete and is obviously thecore of the problem, although explaining one's ideas and beingunderstood by people is also the core problem of civilisation and wehaven't cracked that one yet either." There is less reason tobe optimistic about language-based interfaces, he concludes: "I will say that point-and-grunt is not a very sophisticated way of communicating, but it may be all that technology can currently understand."