>Voice assistants are basically just mainstream non-visual command-lines, and it's unsurprising to me that something that relies heavily on memorization and extremely specialized "skills" isn't quite taking off in the way it was imagined.

This got me thinking. Voice recognition is basically a commodity now .. there are open source AI engines that can do it offline really well. So the recognition part is solved, you can just grab it from your distro's package manager. Now there's just the language part.

Thing is, I don't want to speak to my computer using English. Aside from the enormous practical problems in natural language processing you've outlined, I just find the idea creepy[1].

What I want is to unambiguously tell it to do arbitrary things. I.e. use it as an actual computer, not a toy that can do a few tricks. I.e. actually program it. In some kind of Turing complete shell language that is optimized for being spoken aloud. You would speak words into the open source voice recognizer, it writes those to stdout, then an interpreter reads from stdin and executes the instructions.

Is there any language like this? What should it look like?

And yeah that would take effort to learn to use it right, just like any other programming language; so be it. This would be a hobbyist thing.

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/054/961/748...