To be fair about the keyboard thing, when I was born computers were programmed through punch cards, and I never learned how to use them. They switched to keyboards pretty quick after that.
So to a 6 year old who can't use a keyboard... well I don't see keyboards disappearing quite that quick, but it's obvious that voice interaction is going to feature quite heavily into the future of computing.
Right, but voice input will likely always suck as much for computers as it does for human beings. The keyboard, even the touch keyboard, is a better way to input any reasonably complex string. If people spend any time together that isn't recorded by Google, then they will have inside jokes, puns, portmanteaux (this word was not in my dictionary), and words that Google/M$/Apple simply haven't heard enough of to recognize. In an office environment, it is absolutely unacceptable for everyone to be using voice input to compose documents, comments, and emails.
I’ve worked at companies who have said it would be absolutely unacceptable for everyone to have a computer at their desk. I’ve worked places where they said it would be absolutely unacceptable for everyone to have an internet connection at their desk. I’ve worked at places where everyone is constantly on the phone at their desk, and somehow they make it work.
And I just noticed I’m breaking my rule of never responding to the kind of troll who would put “M$” to mean Microsoft so I’m going to end here. I’m sorry for wasting my time.
Geez, that's a pretty restrictive rule. M$ is for folks who remember just how many people got sued by Microsoft back in the day. No matter how tame they seem today, they have been positively aggressive in the past. It ultimately hurt them as much as it hurt the community, but they conducted themselves poorly.
As for those other things, those are matters of personal distraction. It may not seem acceptable to have a computer or an internet connection at the desk, but that's a matter of self-discipline. Everyone talking all the time around you is something you can't overcome simply by disciplining yourself.
Voice:
- socially embarrassing
- prohibitively imprecise (when is precision not necessary??)
- low work, but also low quality
- currently popular methods require some outside company handling your audio
- also require a good network connection, which shouldn't be treated as a given
These are all related to my own situation and preferences, of course, and I'm sure that there are some people where your list of positives vastly outweigh my list of negatives. No one's served well by assuming that everyone has the same requirements.
I want to make it clear that I'm not specifically targeting you for this comment, it's more of a meta comment on the whole subject we're discussing.
I find it interesting how people tend to get stuck to the current forms of technology and then become outraged when anyone dares challenge it. Who needs Windows, I boot straight to DOS. Windows N sucks, I'm going to stick with Windows N-1. Blackberry phones are useless and pretentious, I'm going to stick with Nextel. The iPhone is stupid, I need a physical keyboard. Bluetooth is awful, I need my headphone jack. The iPod is worse than a Nomad. The iPad is just a big iPhone. And now, apparently, voice control sucks, I'm happy with my on-screen keyboard.
And as history shows us in nearly every one of those cases, us tech guys are typically the worst judge of how well a new technology will fare in the market and what consumers actually want.
> And now, apparently, voice control sucks, I'm happy with my on-screen keyboard.
Nah, on-screen keyboards suck, I'm happy with my non-mobile devices (when possible). Bluetooth is an expensive pain in the ass, though ;-)
I'm used to my desires not meshing well with the way that markets go (and I'll bet that other like-minded techies are too). Out of the specific things I mentioned with voice recognition, most of them will change with technological improvements and shifts in societal norms. Change is inevitable.
Honestly, I'll still find a way to do what I want, even if most other users are happy to have tech go in a different direction. I'm not deluded enough to think that what I want is what anyone else wants.
I don't see a distinction with punch cards, as punch cards were just an added step between keyboard and input device. You still used a keyboard to input, although more slowly and with a more limited character set.
Unless, of course, you had keypunch operator minions available. I preferred to do it myself, as it would take me longer to hand-print the contents into those little boxes.
So to a 6 year old who can't use a keyboard... well I don't see keyboards disappearing quite that quick, but it's obvious that voice interaction is going to feature quite heavily into the future of computing.