Oh come on, sure you can tell a computer "build my website". You can use language, or you can click a button. Oh, but the result is not what you want? Even whe

Oh come on, sure you can tell a computer "build my website". You can use language, or you can click a button. Oh, but the result is not what you want? Even when communicating with a human, you need to provide some specs, right? But then, natural language is way to imprecise and open to interpretation, coupled with the fact that people don't really know for sure what they want, so even when speaking with a developer, you're going to go through several iterations. So for the ultimate flexibility and automation, the user interface of such a smart appliance will end up being essentially a programming language (being the same reason for why lawyers and mathematicians have their own language that's anything but natural). Truth of the matter is, computers answering to commands aren't really that interesting, as they already do this. What we really want are computers capable of ideas. Also, natural language processing is hard because it's based on an incredible amount of implicit context that life taught us ever since we were born and when communicating to our fellow humans, it's never about just the actual words being spoken. When saying something like "build my website" your spouse probably knows you're talking about a website meant for marketing yourself and she probably knows your tastes and values too; she observed your fears and dreams while living your mundane life, even if you've never talked with her explicitly about such issues (speaking of women, they are incredibly good at reading between the lines). Solving natural language processing is basically akin to creating sentient beings.