You may check telegram’s games, services and other bots that allow to manage your entire world via chat (with programmatic buttons and menus to ease /cmds a little). I don’t use it much, but my coworker said that he almost lives there, visiting sites only for long, static content.

From this perspective, “we” don’t “need” as the article says, since it’s already there and writing a simple bot is a no-brainer. (Downsides of proprietary protocol are obvious.)