NLU is not a User Interface

Some time ago I already spoke about NLU vs Dialogmanagement. My hope was that people working in NLU and Voice User Interface design would start talking to each other. I enhanced these ideas in a paper submitted to the IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects: NLU vs. Dialog Management: To Whom am I Speaking? In essence "Dialogmangement-centered  systems  are  principally  constrained  because they anticipate the users input as plans to help them to achieve their goal.   Depending  on  the  implemented  dialog  strategy they allow for different degrees of flexibility. NLU-centered systems see the central point in the semantics of the utterance, which should also be grounded with previous utterances or external content.  Thus, whether speech or not, NLU regards this as a stream of some input to produce some output. Since no dialog model is employed,  resulting user interfaces currently do not handle much more than single queries".

Actual dialog systems must go beyond this and combine knowledge from both research domains to provide convincing user interfaces.

Now, I stumbled across a blog entry from Matthew Honnibal who bemoans the current hype around artificial intelligence and the ubiquitous promise for more natural user interfaces. He is right that voice simply is another user interface. He states:  "My point here is that a linguistic user interface (LUI) is just an interface. Your application still needs a conceptual model, and you definitely still need to communicate that conceptual model to your users. So, ask yourself: if this application had a GUI, what would that GUI look like?"

He continues with mapping the spoken input to method calls along with their parameters. Then, he concludes: "The linguistic interface might be better, or it might be worse. It comes down to design, and your success will be intimately connected to the application you’re trying to build."

This is exactly the point where voice user interface design comes into play. Each modality requires special design  knowledge for effective interfaces.  Matthew Honnibal seems neither be aware of the term VUI nor of the underlying aproaches and concepts. Maybe, it is time to rediscover it to build better voice-based interfaces employing state-of-the-art NLU technology.