Comment by tauchunfall

"They are talked at as if they were friendly co-workers and, and this is the really important point, the talking is not programming."

The technical manual of TNG [1] states, "Most panels are also configured to accept vocal input, although keyboard input is preferred in most situations for greater operating speed and reduced chance of input error by voice discriminator algorithms." (page 33). Even in the original Star Trek they quite often use the panels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation...