Langridge: No UI is some UI

At his blog, Stuart Langridge takes issue with a recent Medium post by Tony Aubé titled No UI is the New UI. Aubé's premise is that "invisible" applications—those that use text-messaging or voice-recognition rather than on-screen interfaces—are the future of UI design. Langridge, however, contends that "until very recently, and honestly pretty much still, a computer can’t understand the nuance of language. So 'use language 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 the core of the problem, although explaining one’s ideas and being understood by people is also the core problem of civilisation and we haven’t cracked that one yet either". There is less reason to be 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."

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