The bot hype right now isn't about average UIs being replaced with text prompts of "What would you like to do today?", it's about large walled-garden ecosystems (Google, FB, Amazon, Apple, MS, Kik, etc.) funneling web searches and services through their own systems.

The article's most crucial point is that a natural language UI is just another interface to the limited set of functionality the application is capable of. But to the current big players in these game, these limitations don't apply: if the parsed commands fall through all of their many layers of specialty logic, they can always fall back to a generic web search.

By doing so, they will have provided the user with an interface that tries to understand what they want, while being no worse than if the user had typed the same thing into a search bar. And all the while, they have routed the user's intent through their AI, enabling better personalized recommendations, and tracking of click-through rates.