Comment by bagacrap

This is confusing. Voice is not a UI, it's an input device. When I call my bank and have to input some numbers into the automated system, I prefer to say them than to type them. The phone menu system is the UI, fingers or voice are two different input modes for the same UI.

The problem with alexa booking tickets is not the use of my voice but that there are a lot of decisions (comparison shopping, seat selection etc) to be made. Alexa can't read my mind to make the trade-offs I would make, although it could ask me 10 zillion questions. The difference between voice/ears and fingers/eyes is the bandwidth of information transfer, but also the availability of the tools. Hands and eyes may be busy as in your car example, but they are also busy if I'm carrying a toddler around the house or can't be bothered to reach into my pocket or am already using my phone for something else (game, video etc). So voice is a good option for many tasks. And LLMs/agents do have the potential to make more tasks (simple ones, not booking tickets) accessible to voice since "AI as UI" is where it holds the most potential IMHO. And that's great because we need all the help we can get to avoid taking our phones out of our pockets and getting sucked into random tangents like HN comment threads just bc we wanted to check the weather