Well, yes and no.

I appreciate interfaces that are designed to be used by actual people; they show me that the engineer and/or designer asked the question "how do I make my tool get out of the way?" rather than "how do I accomplish Task X?"

What really annoys me, though, is when the folksy friendly interface gets in my way far more aggressively than the old machine-like interfaces did. In those cases, the lack of a precise way to tell the machine what I want to do winds up wasting my time and frustrating me (this is paraphrased, but this exact thing has happened to me countless times):

"[recording] Welcome to [telephone company]. How can I help you today?"

"I'd like to inquire about international roaming."

"OK, you said you'd like to sign up for new service. Is that correct?"

"No."

"Sorry. Please tell me what you'd like to do."

"International roaming."

"OK, you said you'd like to pay your bill. Is that correct?"

"No."

Sometimes, it seems like the old ways of doing things were a whole lot better.