I get why people are interested in voice-enabled solutions like Alexa and Siri. I'm personally not a fan of speaking to get what I want, but I get the attraction for others. Similarly, I get why people are interested in bot enabled solutions like Facebook and Slack are bringing to the table, but I'm personally not a fan of the human-led noise in both of these channels, let alone automating this mayhem with bots.
In short, I'm not 100% on board that voice and bots will be as revolutionary as promised. I do think they will have a significant impact and are worthy of paying attention to, but when it comes to API driven conversational interfaces, I'm putting my money on push driven approaches to making API magic happen. Approaches like Push by Zapier, and Webtask.io, where you can initiate a single, or chain of API driven events from the click on a button in the browser, in a web page, on my mobile phone, or hell, using the Amazon Dash button approach.
These web tasks operate in an asynchronous way, making them more conversational-esque. Allowing those of us who are anti-social, and have adequate air gapped our social and messaging channels, and haven't fully subscribed to the surveillance economy, alternate solutions. These mediums could even facilitate a back and forth, passing machine readable values, until the desired result has been achieved. Some conversations could be predefined or saved, allowing me to trigger using a button at any point (ie. reorder that product from Amazon, retweet that article from last week). I'm not saying I don't want to have an API-enabled conversation, I'm just not sure I want a speaker or bot always present to get what I need to get done in my day.
I understand that I am not the norm. There are plenty of folks who have no problem with devices listening around their home or business, and are super excited when it comes to engaging with half-assed artificial intelligence wich accomplish basic tasks in our world(s). But I can't be that far out in left field. I'm thinking the landscape for conversational interfaces will be diverse, with some voice, some chat, and hopefully also some asynchronous approaches to having conversations that can be embedded anywhere across our virtual and physical worlds.
