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I like this point, but I think it has more to do with the latency of communication. The immediacy of the chat interface is the issue, not communication itself; the immediacy creates a stronger sense of intimacy and interactivity. It should be more like email: you email the LLM a task or question, and some period of time later (probably on the order of 30 min or so is enough to break the psychological offloading aspect) you get whatever artifacts it produced, and it encourages you to think about and digest what the LLM generated before moving on to the next thing. Maybe, if the LLM has clarifying questions etc, it could respond back in 5 minutes instead.
I do think this could help with this angle, but a slower response is probably not as important as one that does not seem like a person on the internet.
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I like this idea from a cognitive psychology perspective, but I fear it introduces a number of serious usability challenges. If I'm, say, coding and am using an LLM to help me debug, waiting 30 minutes for assistance would obliterate any chance of entering a flow state within the work. Perhaps there could be multiple product lines - one optimized for short-term responses and another that follows a high-latency "correspondence" model - but the task of positioning them in the market and adequately advertising it strikes me as extremely difficult. I just don't think there is a significant appetite for high-friction technology, and this is coming from someone who has tried to switch to a flip phone repeatedly.
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