You're right that the language is not the API, it is the medium. The "appointment booking API" exists only in our heads, it is a set of mutually understood conventions for interpreting a subset of language in order to create a record of the appointment somewhere.
If you call up a hair salon and start reciting poetry you'll get an error response in the same way as you would if you had sent malformed JSON to an endpoint. If you stick to the expected script you'll achieve success almost all of the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of human communication works this way, especially when it involves individuals who do not know each other. We have agreed upon limits, key phrases and words, and expected responses that allow most of the unpredictable stuff to be ruled out. All of that favours automation.
> We have agreed upon limits, key phrases and words, and expected responses that allow most of the unpredictable stuff to be ruled out. All of that favours automation.
I'm not sure I'd disagree, but it seems you're just describing a domain specific language in a more roundabout way. We have a ton of protocols that introduce a set of limits, key phrases, words, and responses. Java, Network protocols, XML, JSON, etc...
Assuming that you're correct, does it make sense to then assume that it'll be an improvement to standardize English rather than a set of IP headers? The agreed upon standards in English are (for the most part) informal, evolve constantly, and are hard to teach to computers. Automation favors predictability, and even the most generous interpretation of a natural language leaves me feeling like it's a step backwards.
We're going to standardize on an appointment booking API that exists only in our heads, that can only be taught using ML, and that is guaranteed to change over time in unpredictable ways? That seems wrong to me.
If you call up a hair salon and start reciting poetry you'll get an error response in the same way as you would if you had sent malformed JSON to an endpoint. If you stick to the expected script you'll achieve success almost all of the time.
I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of human communication works this way, especially when it involves individuals who do not know each other. We have agreed upon limits, key phrases and words, and expected responses that allow most of the unpredictable stuff to be ruled out. All of that favours automation.