I think the google example is interesting because if you watch people use google they formulate their questions as if they are asking a human and not a search e

I think the google example is interesting because if you watch people use google they formulate their questions as if they are asking a human and not a search engine or a command line. They don't search for keywords, they don't use the + and - operators, they don't enquote snippets of text that should match exactly, no they ask a question, starting with how/what/who/when/where and sometimes even add a question mark at the end! If i were to find out who is starring in a movie for example i would search for the movie title, click on imdb and browse through the actor-list. If a non techie would do the same thing the query would be something like "who was the lead actor in X?". Now translate this into replying to a comment in a bug tracker, google has thousands of engineers just working on interpreting "stupid" queries, there is no way this type of AI can scale and work against some arbitrary API to a bug tracker maintained by 5 people. Discoverability of available commands is also still an issue, not even solved by google. In their case people only know about one command because there is only one: search. If you were to add commands such as "create task", "reply", "send email", "tweet", how would that even work, is it first interpreted as a search query about how to send emails and then it suggests opening your email client? While it's a nice way to start your email client, and exactly how windows start menu works, it doesn't help any further in the workflow of translating GUI-tasks into command line tasks because it only takes you past the first step.