@david_chisnall The idea of using natural language to control things predates Star Trek in AI research. Natural Language Processing (NLP) research dates to the 1950s. By the time I was studying NLP under Winograd in the 1980s the need for limited unambiguous vocabulary and grammar for command and control (CC) was obvious.

But CC is not the only use of NLP as the speech recognition systems developed in the 90s demonstrated.

Such tools need not be perfect to be useful.