Conservational user interfaces are opaque; they lack affordances. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
I immediately knew the last generation of voice assistants was dead garbage when there was no way to know what it could do, they just expected you to try 100 things, until it worked randomly
> Affordances represent the possibilities in the world for how an agent (a person, animal, or machine) can interact with something. Some affordances are perceivable, others are invisible. Signifiers are signals. Some signifiers are signs, labels, and drawings placed in the world, such as the signs labeled “push,” “pull,” or “exit” on doors, or arrows and diagrams indicating what is to be acted upon or in which direction to gesture, or other instructions. Some signifiers are simply the perceived affordances, such as the handle of a door or the physical structure of a switch. Note that some perceived affordances may not be real: they may look like doors or places to push, or an impediment to entry, when in fact they are not.
With Norman's definition, if a conversational interface can perform an action, it affords that action. The fact that you don't know that it affords that action means there's a lack of a signifier.
As you say, this is a matter of definition, I'm just commenting on Norman's specific definition from the book.