Comment by ben_w

> For narrow use cases we did have natural language interfaces in the 90s, yes. See e.g. IRC bots.

"Narrow" being the key word. Thing is, even in the 2010s, we were doing sentiment analysis by counting the number of positive words and negative words, because it doesn't go past "narrow".

Likewise, "A to B" is great… when it's narrow. I grew up on "Southbrook Road" — not the one in London, not the one in Southampton, not the one in Exeter, …

And then there's where I went to university. Ond mae hynny'n twyllo braidd, oherwydd y Gymraeg. But not cheating very much, because of bilingual rules and because of the large number of people with multi-lingual email content. Cinco de mayo etc.

I also grew up with text adventures, which don't work if you miss the expected keyword, or mis-spell it too hard. (And auto-correction has its own problems, as anyone who really wants to search for "adsorption" not "absorption" will tell you).

> That exact thing has been a feature of Gmail for over a decade. Remember the 2018 GCal spam?

Siri has something similar. It misses a lot and makes up a lot. Sometimes it sets the title to be the date and makes up a date.

These are examples of not doing things successfully with just a hundred hard-coded rules.