Natural language is the lazy user interface

ChatGPT has kicked off a frenzy. It is all anyone in the tech world is talking about it seems. Startups are popping up left and right. Big companies are rapidly releasing ChatGPT-like features integrated in their products.

It puts all the burden on the user to articulate good questions. What to ask, when to ask it, how to ask it, to make sense of the response, and then to repeat that many times.

The need to support multiple modalities isn't new—it just seems we are so awestruck by LLMs that new software features are launching that regress to a single modality.

For example, an application could feed the relevant context to the model behind the scenes and use that to preemptively suggest what I should do next. The toolbar could adapt to my specific task. Dialog boxes wouldn't have to be so static. I could point to a region of the screen and ask for an explanation. The system could show me examples based on what I'm doing. Tutorials could take on a personality that better suits me.

The least it could do is intelligently give me a starting point for typing in a prompt. The tyranny of the blank textbox is real.

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