Recently I had to replace the brake pads on my car. All four of them, and it was quite an expense.

I was cautious driving with the new pads. Partly because the workshop asked me to break them in. And partly because the large expense reminded me to drive carefully without stepping on the brakes unnecessarily. For a while, I observed the brake lights of the cars ahead of me. I became conscious of my speed, when I applied the brakes, how long and how hard.

That’s when I realised something. I have only three primary interfaces to communicate with my car while driving: steering, accelerator, and brakes. When I used to drive stick-shift, there were two more: clutch and gear. In the UK, through narrow winding roads or in heavy traffic, I tend to press the brakes more often than some of the people ahead of me. That’s the only interface I have to communicate with an automatic transmission.

Sometimes I think the conversational interfaces we use through chatbots are like automatic transmission. There is mostly one style of interaction: natural language text. For a while I was an advocate of this approach, since natural language is compatible with speech interfaces, either directly as voice or through in-device transcription features.

These days, I am increasingly frustrated with this one-dimensional interface for broader business use cases. It might be a good strategy for customer support or scenarios where conversation is the natural interaction pattern. But we already have a rich set of interfaces on our devices. We can provide structured inputs through forms, buttons, swipes, scans.

Back to the car analogy. Most cars today support speech recognition to control climate and entertainment systems. What if that were the only interface? No buttons? There is already a backlash against touchscreens replacing tactile buttons. It is good to give alternatives to the user until newer interaction patterns become reliable, unbiased, and natural. Perhaps they will always need alternatives. Different contexts demand different interfaces.

And by the way, I have paddle shifts in my car. I figured they’re useful only for spirited driving. Without the clutch, paddle shifts are not much use in slow traffic. Some interfaces are solutions looking for a problem.