NLP not being nearly ready. Some of the requests were powered by people on the backend and we hoped to use that as a training set. We could, but we only were able to automate the most basic things like reminders, weather, todo lists, daily transit, etc
People have been using text menus, back through early SMS, all the way to dialup in the 70s. Probably before.
But instead of proper menu items (1 for restaurants, 2 for blah blah), then submenus (1 for order, 2 for reservation), there is this strange fascination with natural langiage parsing via text.
Meanwhile, typing '1', then '1' is far better than 'i want to order from a restaraunt'.
Shorter, no mistakes, more precise, easy to use.
Search, such as 'search restaurants' has been a thing too.
I don't want to talk to a machine, which is designed to use as many glue words as possible, and seeks natural language as a reply. What a time waste!
All that politeness is for humans, we don't need it from a bot.
