NLUI is the successor to GUI

Wed Aug 06 2025

As the story goes, in 1979, Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC and was highly impressed by their graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse technology, and it heavily influenced the direction Apple took. Since then, GUI has dominated the UI world when it comes to non-programmers.

With the rise of LLMs, we might see the decline of GUI. It will not disappear, but it will slowly start to be replaced by NLUIs (Natural Language User Interfaces). Right now, they are just a gimmick, but soon they will start taking over.

I can absolutely imagine my grandma typing into (or even saying to) her phone “Reduce brightness” or “Change the picture on the background” instead of asking me to do it. Settings used to be set through CLI (Command Line Interface), then through (often complicated and deeply nested) GUIs. Soon they will be set by writing and speaking a human language.

Many other “complex” GUIs will follow.