Shoehorning in the Name of Science

This provocation paper calls for a deeper understanding of what spoken human-computer interaction is, and what it can be. Its given structure by a story of humanlikeness and fraudulent spoken dialogue systems - specifically systems that deliberately attempts to mislead their interlocutors into believing that they are speaking to a human. Against this backdrop, a plea that conversational user interfaces are viewed from the perspective of conversation and spoken interaction first, and from the perspective of GUIs and interface design second, lest we impose the limitations of one field onto the possibilities of another, rather than the other way around.