A long time hobby of mine is creating new kinds of text typing systems for situations when there is no QWERTY keyboard available. I’ve been doing this now for literally decades, and I have lost track of the number of different systems I’ve come up with.
It’s a topic that is becoming newly relevant as VR gradually becomes more widespread. Yet I wonder whether all such systems will fall away, as AI and other technologies advance.
Will typing itself will simply become superfluous. Will people eventually just talk to their computers and come to expect an accurate result?
Perhaps the skill of using ones hands and fingers to generate text will fall away. It may become one of those quaint cultural artifacts of long-ago, like knowing how to sharpen the tip of a quill writing pen.
But I kind of hope not — I like typing, and I would love to see it stick around. I also suspect there are still people out there who know how to sharpen the tip of a quill writing pen,
The QWERTY keyboard is a great invention. We’ve had a century and a half to come up with something better, and it has yet to be displaced. (Contrast to film cameras, which are of a similar vintage).
Also- Talking to computers is a complete fail for writing code. Could you imagine pronouncing all that punctuation?
“for open parenthesis i equals zero semicolon i less than equal to max semicolon i plus plus close parenthesis open brace…”
In grad school, a friend volunteered for an organization reading textbooks for blind students. “Hey, you’re studying computers? Read this programming book for us!”.
It was much like the example above.
Very good points. Yet talking to computers to code most likely would not be anything like coding in C++. It would more likely combine speech with gesture, using hand tracking and future versions of augmented reality.
A fundamentally new paradigm requires a change of assumptions. One could imagine, before cars were introduced, somebody dismissing the very idea because it would be too difficult to replicate the movement of horses’ legs.
Good writing, whether it’s a novel or a quick email message, requires editing and rewriting. I can’t imagine what it would be like to do that by voice. Pen and paper, sure. Keyboard and screen, absolutely. Strictly by voice? I dunno.
A lot of what people say is a jumble of incomplete sentences, grammatical errors, and poor word choices. I include myself in that. We get by because most of what we say isn’t very important, because we lean on intonation and body language, and because we’re mostly talking to friends, family, and colleagues with whom we share a vast amounts of context.
I’ll accept that an AI could eventually be constructed to understand us. But if the point is to transcribe, then it’s also must be able to translate that understanding into coherent, written language. I’m not sure I’d want to read a novel that had been dictated like that.
Ooh, I love that this is getting controversial. 🙂
Editing is, indeed, a fundamental part of writing — arguably the most important part. Yet if we posit a world where there are new ways of generating text, it is reasonable to posit that there will also be new ways of editing text.
Text editing in the future might involve some combination of speech and gesture. Although it may involve speech, it won’t be like talking, in the sense that “talking” is understood today.
I completely agree that whatever that future interface paradigm is, it will likely make good use intonation and body language, in addition to speech and gesture.
Well have guys (and gals or whatever you call yourself) check out MessagEase?
That’s a keyboard specifically created for touchscreen devices.
Sadly they’re not popular enough.
MessagEase is definitely cool. Sadly, for most users it is not nearly as fast as QWERTY, probably because it uses only one finger.