New research suggests that sci-fi’s most popularly-depicted method of interfacing with AI may actually produce worse results than even badly-typed prompts. From HAL to Deep Thought, from C3P0 to Wall-E, the idealized form of human/AI relations has always centered around voice-control; and this has manifested in the real world, from early assistant systems such as Siri and Alexa, to language-based querying and colloquy with the current range of frontier LLMs. This idea emerged during less…