Well, here's a possibility: we'll meet in the middle. Companies will train humans into learning a new kind of speech which is more easily machine-recognisable. These dialects will be very similar to English but more constrained in syntax and vocabulary; they will verge on being spoken programming languages. They'll bear a resemblence to, and be constructed in similar ways to, jargon and phrasing used in aviation, optimised for clarity and unambiguity over low-quality connections. Throw in optional macros and optimisations which increase expressive power but make it sound like gibberish to the uninitiated. And then kids who grow up with these dialects will be able to voice-activate their devices with an unreal degree of fluency, almost like musical instruments.
The challenge with learning anything new from our voicebots is the same as it already is: discoverability. I don't have the patience to listen to Siri's canned response when it's done what I've asked it to, and I'm probably not going to listen to it tell me "Next time, you can say xyz and I'll work better."
The easiest way to learn a new language is to be a kid and listen to native speakers converse. Unless Amazon produces a kids' show starring a family of Echos speaking their machine code, I don't see that happening.
The commands and syntax he uses to interact with the system might be a decent approximation of the custom English syntax you suggest.
We do this in a hundred ways in English, emphasis, meta-words, too many to fold into a system. But with a little user prodding, I think you could cover enough of this ground to still sound almost natural.
Asst.: Would you like me to read that back to you?
User: Yes
A: The click brown ox...
U: The _quick_ brown _fox_...
A: Ok. The the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy log.
Is that correct?
U: No.
A: Which part [is incorrect]?
U: The the quick
A: The the quick. What should it be?
U: The quick.
A: The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy log. Is that
correct?
U: No. Lazy dog.
A: Lazy log?
U: No. Lazy dog.
A: Spell "log." <Or "Spell" + recording of user's voice saying ambiguous word>
U: D-O-G.
A: Ah. The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog. Do
I have it now?
U: Yes.
A: Say 'send' to send message.
If people enjoyed this kind of interaction with their computer, it would become common place and they'd likely become so much better at interaction.
From what we know, those techiques play an important roles in how humans themselves go from baby glibberish to actual language fluency - and from what I understand there is already a lot of research ongoing how reinforcement learning algorithms can be used to learn walking cycles and similar things.
So I'd say, if you find a way to read the non-/semiverbal cues humans use to communicate understanding or misunderstanding among themselves and use those as penalties/rewards for computers, you might be on a way to learn some kind of languages that humans and computers can communicate with.
The same goes into the other direction. There is a sector of software where human users not only frequently master highly intricate interfaces, they even do it out of their own motivation and pride themselves on archieving fluency: Computer games. The secret here is a blazing fast feedback loop - which gives back penalty and reward cues in a similar way to reinforcement learning - and a carefully tuned learning curve which starts with simple, easy to learn concepts and gradually becomes more complex.
I would argue, if you combine those two techniques - using penalties and rewards to train the computers and communicate back to the user how well the computer understood you, you might be able to move to a middle-ground representation without it seeming like much effort on the human side.
Speech is way, way harder.
Finger-on-nose! It seems to be a question of utility and efficiency rather than primarily an emotional response to effectiveness of a given UI.
I type emails because it's faster. I handwrite class notes because I often use freeform groupings and diagrams that would make using a word processor painful.
Most owners eventually used them like laptops unless illustrating, or operating in a sort of "personal presentation mode," where folding the screen flat was convenient. For most people, handwriting recognition was a cool trick that didn't get used much (as I suspect it was for you, eventually).
The utility of a handwriting recognition system is ultimately constrained by the method of correcting mistakes. Even a 99% accuracy means that on average you'll be correcting about one word per paragraph, which is enough to feel like a common task. If the only method of correction is via the pen, then the options are basically to select from a set of guesses the system gives you (if it does that), or rewrite the word until it gets recognized.
But if a product has a keyboard, then you can just use the keyboard for corrections. But if you're going to use the keyboard for corrections, why not just use it for writing in the first place...
In alphabetic languages. What about Chinese, or Japanese?
For Japanese there are keyboard-based romaji and kana based input methods.
The correct Hanzi/Kanji is either inferred from context or, as a back-up, selected by the user.
You are right that the ten-key method is more common on cell phones (and older feature phones had kana assigned to number keys), although romaji input is also available.
It seems within the bounds of possibility to me (from having no experience in the field ;), if patterns could be predictably matched in real-time or better time than it takes to whack the keyboard or move the mouse (can EEG or FMRI make predictable sort of patterns like that?).
I doubt we're going to make much progress there anytime soon.
In my experience that 'solution' isn't a solution but rather a poorly guessed attempt at one single part of it. Whenever I've thought I have the architecture of a class all figured out there is one corner case that destroys all the lovely logic and you either start from scratch on yet another brittle monolith, or accept that you are essentially writing spaghetti code. At that point documentation that explains what does what and why is the only way to 'solve' the issue of coding.
This is based on my experience with the Muse [1] headset, which has 4 electrodes plus a reference electrode. I know there are similar devices with around a dozen or so electrodes, but I can't imagine they're a significant improvement.
So I think we're still a long way off from what you're describing :(
But also, when my college had a demo microsoft tablet in their store in 2003, I could sign my name as I usually do (typical poor male handwriting) and it recognized every letter. That seems pretty good to me.
I also had a Palm Pilot then and Grafitti sucked, but that's just one implementation.
No, we are not talking about the 1940s, why would anyone be talking about the 1940s? How does that make any sense at all?
We aren't talking about a Microsoft demo that worked well for you once, either. We are talking about the fact that, since the 2000s when it was tried repeatedly, people do not like to hand-write on computers. It is a strange thing not to be aware of when you're speaking so emphatically on the topic.
Since he didn't specify the timeframe, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and thought it he was talking about before my time.
Apart from the problems mentioned in the comment you replied to. You don't seem to have a point other than being contrarian (as a state).
A lot of folks are too young to know this, but there was a time when it was accepted wisdom that much of personal computing would eventually converge to a pen-based interface, with the primary enabling technology being handwriting recognition.
What I found is that computer handwriting recognition can never ever be good enough to satisfy people's expectations. Why? Because no one is good enough to satisfy most people's expectations for handwriting recognition, including other humans, and often even including themselves!
Frustration with reading handwriting is a given in human interaction. It will be a given in computer interaction too--only, people don't feel like they need to be polite to a computer. So they freely get mad about it.
The companies that had succeeded with pen computing were those that had figured out a way to work around interpreting natural handwriting.
One category was companies who are specialized in pen computing as an art interface--Wacom being the primary example at the time. No attempt at handwriting recognition at all.
The other was companies who had tricked people into learning a new kind of handwriting. The primary example is the Palm Pilot's "Graffiti" system of characters. The neat thing about Graffiti is it reversed customer expectations. Because it was a new way of writing, when recognition failed, customers often blamed themselves for not doing it right!
We all know what happened instead of pens: touchscreen keyboards. The pen interface continues to be a niche UI, focused more on art than text.
It's interesting to see the parallels with spoken word interfaces. I don't know what the answer is. I doubt many people would have predicted in 2001 that the answer to pen computing was a touchscreen keyboard without tactile keys. Heck people laughed about it in 2007 when the iPhone came out.
But I won't be surprised if the eventual product that "solves" talking to a computer, wins because it hacks its way around customer expectations in a novel way--rather than delivering a "perfect" voice interface.