You're mixing two different arguments, but there is merit to both.
Once upon a time, I worked on speech recognition and synthesis at Microsoft - we shipped
the first Speech API that wasn't produced by Microsoft Research. (Instead of 137
interfaces, there were five.) It was a good product, offering quite accurate
speaker-independent recognition, but it wasn't going to replace keyboards.
For one thing: it's bad enough when you have a roomfull of people talking on
telephones. Imagine if they were also talking to their computers! One of the problems
speech recognition has yet to solve is the so-called 'cocktail party' scenario: a
computer cannot pick out and focus on one voice among many. So if the woman in the next
cubicle has a particularly loud, penetrating voice (not that that's ever happened to
me), your results may vary.... I've also noticed that people who are talking to
devices don't modulate their voices the same way people do when talking to other
people. There's no sense of feedback, and volume rises. (It's interesting that
the only place voice systems have really become successful is - on the phone!) Further,
since the device isn't perfect but again provides no mitigating feedback upon error,
people rapidly become frustrated with voice systems, once again leading to raised voices.
IMHO a more important factor is that our application software is written for keyboard
input, with varying support for mouse input. Spoken interaction is dramatically different
from either command-line interaction or its translation to the GUI. This goes beyond UI,
and requires a very different model of communication with our digital companions. Given
the above objection, no one has put much time or money into tackling the problem. Speech
recognition will not catch on either among vendors or customers if it's simply a
replacement for the keyboard and the model of interaction it engenders.
Regarding touchscreen devices, yes, I agree that mice are on their way out.
Remember the cute little pop-out mouse on the HP Omnibook? As we move more to mobile
devices (a category in which the iPad barely 'fits'!), physical pointing devices
are awkward (including a stylus, which is easily lost). But once again we will need to
make changes to our user interfaces: isn't it fun trying to select one line from a
single-spaced list on a Web page? (I have an Android-based 7" tablet, which I'm
coming to dearly love.) Also, there is a very significant difference between the mouse
and the touchscreen: the former has a persistent cursor. The touchscreen has no
'default' for 'clicking' but instead enables all visible icons as
potential action objects. This is more akin to the light-pen/gun devices that predate the
mouse (the mouse was not the original pointing device). This subtle difference can make
it challenging to port a mouse-based application to a touchscreen.
While touchscreens will likely supplant the mouse, at least for the mobile computing world
(which is becoming the dominant expression of information technology), speech recognition
just isn't going to replace keyboards, simply because it's a fundamentally
different means of communication. -- Ian
________________________________________
From: cctalk-bounces at
classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at
classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of
Alexey Toptygin [alexeyt at
freeshell.org]
Sent: Thursday, September 30, 2010 6:49 PM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Voice recognition will never kill the keyboard was: Re: Evolution of the
Apple Mouse
On Thu, 30 Sep 2010, Liam Proven wrote:
Mind you, come to that, as ordinary user PCs migrate
to being
multi-touch-operated slates, it could be that mice will disappear
altogether. Keyboards too, when the speech recognition gets good
enough.
I know many, many people that can type faster than they can talk. And then
there's programming. When every character matters, and many of them are
punctuation, speech recoginition (and speech for that matter) falls flat
on its face. It will never be faster to pronounce:
print join(',', map $_->(), @$closures), "\n" for 1..$num;
than it is to type it. And that's relatively readable; perl lets you code
with >50% punctuation...
When I see photos of the 'keyboardless' ipad, more often than not there's
a virtual keyboard taking up half of that very expensive screen... I
giggle and keep on typing :-)
Alexey