Recent years have seen significant market penetration for voice-based
personal assistants such as Apple's Siri. However, despite this success, user
take-up is frustratingly low. This position paper argues that there is a
habitability gap caused by the inevitable mismatch between the capabilities and
expectations of human users and the features and benefits provided by
contemporary technology. Suggestions are made as to how such problems might be
mitigated, but a more worrisome question emerges: "is spoken language
all-or-nothing"? The answer, based on contemporary views on the special nature
of (spoken) language, is that there may indeed be a fundamental limit to the
interaction that can take place between mismatched interlocutors (such as
humans and machines). However, it is concluded that interactions between native
and non-native speakers, or between adults and children, or even between humans
and dogs, might provide critical inspiration for the design of future
speech-based human-machine interaction.

声控助手的普及是受欢迎的，但由于人的能力与期望与现有技术的功能和好处之间不可避免的不匹配，存在可居住差距，拟解决此类问题，但是否存在语言交互的固有限制？基于目前对语言的特殊性质的看法，回答是可能存在。然而，作者得出结论，将来的人机交互设计可以从母语与非母语发言者、成人和儿童以及人类和狗之间的交互中获得关键的灵感。