[nateparrott]

It's not just voice input that's severely neglected by UI designers—it's text-based interface in general. Consider his example of choosing "California" from a list of states—most people would find it way easier to just type "CA" than to scroll and hunt for "California" in a list—but how often do you see an interface that prods you to do this, or even makes apparent that it's possible? (In some web apps that use custom menus, it isn't!) Why, when I want to apply a 10px blur in Photoshop, can't I just type "blur 10 pixels" instead of digging through 2 nested menus and a modal? WIMP interfaces are great for _discovering_ what an app can do, but terrible at letting you do a specific thing fast.

Things like spotlight and wolfram alpha are a step forward, but we're still light-years behind where we could be if we took text-based UI—or hybrid WIMP/text UI—seriously.