Star Trek - Hello Computer

I may date myself here, but the first thing that popped into my head when I read the title of this post was this scene from ST IV: [VIDEO] It's kinda funny watching someone without a background in CS repeatedly ask google/alexa/siri a question in different ways that you know isn't going to elicit any kind of useful response.

I’m working on something similar. The target market is the 99% of people who want to program ad-hoc domain-specific problems. For example, generating charts w/o having to dig through all the data sources (Wolfram Alpha does a simple version of this). Building a financial risk model for a client’s specific request (you have to be a whiz at Excel, python or some internal ide). Even for home automation, my mom can’t use Alexa’s awful app to customize routines. I don’t think the voice part is necessary. It’s easy enough to slap ASR on the front. But going from natural language -> full problem spec -> code is hard in the general case, but doable in well-understood domains. Why can’t Scotty talk to a computer? ( [VIDEO] )

Star Trek illustrated the issue nicely in the scene where Scotty, who we should remember is an engineer, tries to talk to a computer mouse in the 20th century: [VIDEO]