Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years?

Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years? by joshbuddy on Thursday January 06, 2011 @04:13PM (#2077203)

Keyboards will be relegated to a specialist tool, something only a small number of people interact with. Much like paper books. I would predict voice recognition will supplant the keyboard as the most common means of entering text.

Basically, what showerst said.

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Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years? by rimantas on Thursday January 06, 2011 @04:20PM (#2077234)

I don't get this "voice recognition" thing, at least I fail to see how it is superior to keyboard. It may have it's uses when your hands are already busy, but otherwise. Starbucks full of people talking to their computers? Cubicles full of people talking 8 hours a day?

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Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years? by showerst on Thursday January 06, 2011 @04:53PM (#2077411)

In fairness, it's not all that uncommon for Starbucks to be full of people talking into thin air to no one (blue tooth cell phone headsets).

The (theoretical) advantage of voice recognition is that you can speak _much_ faster than you can type (except for a few exceptional cases) [1].

On the other hand, I don't think most people would be comfortable with speaking all day either, but things other than voice recognition could still replace the keyboard.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Words_per_min...

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Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years? by wladimir on Friday January 07, 2011 @05:43AM (#2079207)

But isn't the speed advantage gone very soon as soon as you have to type non-english text such as programming languages and specific commands (which are a large part of using a computer, you don't only want to type the text, you also want to format it and move it around).

Try listening to http://www.linux.fm/ for more than three minutes and you'll get my point :)

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Re:Poll: Will keyboards still be around in 20 years? by wladimir on Friday January 07, 2011 @05:35AM (#2079190)

They've been saying this for... 20 years or so? Starting from the first PC soundcards?

Unless AI really takes leaps I'm sure this will not happen any time soon. Voice is too ambiguous to convert to text with sound only. The machine will really have to understand you.

Current voice recognition is really awkward and frustrating, and it's currently much easier to learn fast typing than fast voice input.

(and in addition to that there are the many practical drawbacks to voice recognition as voice elsewhere in this thread)

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