Conversational interfaces have been with us for a long time. Years ago, we had an IRC bot at work that could answer a handful of useful, process-related questions–as well as hurl insults at coworkers on demand. Now, several factors like the ever increasing use of text based communication, better voice recognition and ubiquitous data access are converging to make these conversational interfaces more common.
A couple months back, I experimented with Amazon’s Alexa skills kit, it was a reminder of how many things we take for granted when designing graphical user interfaces. These two articles by Matty Mariansky talk about some of the pitfalls and offer a good introduction to creating a conversational UI. Both are worth a read if you’re interested in this sort of user interface design.
Also, if you’re interested in things voice driven, Voice Interaction UX: Brave New World…Same Old Story goes into some detail about the difficulty of creating voice interfaces.