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[color=blue]
Ah, a keyboard. How quaint.[/color]
And you wrote that with… what? Your voice
recognition software that is so wonderful we all use it? Your tablet
(oh a virtualized keyboard… that makes it so much better…).
The problem with changing a primary way to interface with a computer is
that the keyboard is so stinkin’ efficient. Has anybody here dictated
an entire letter (e-mail) to anybody? Was it a pleasant experience?
Did you speak at normal speed? Was your punctuation, expression of
EXCITEMENT, and anything else outside of single statements handled
perfectly? How about moving from simple things like conversations to
more serious things… like spreadsheets? Has anybody worked in a
spreadsheet using non-keyboards (and I mean physical or virtual
keyboards)? Presentations/Slideshows? Serious documents in some word
processing program with a single ordered list?
Now let’s move on to serious system administration. When was the last
time somebody tried to edit a conf file, modify a registry key, restart
a service, check log events, or do anything else in the realm of “system
administration” without a keyboard? I suppose you can use a mouse to
access these parts of the system and read them, but reading isn’t system
administration.
So we’re stuck trying to either teach humans to work better with
computers (enter the keyboard) or computers to work better with humans
(enter voice recognition technology, or something else that works more
like we do). The former is backward-compatible, fairly fast, accurate
and precise, and ubiquitous even on devices that don’t have a way to
plug them in… and the only thing we hate about them is that on devices
without a physical keyboard they’re so blasted inefficient compared to
the real thing because (well, at least that’s what I hate about them…
that and they cover up the screen when you use them). On the other
hand, voice-recognition technology has been anywhere from terrible to
pretty-bad for a couple of decades, and while in some cases it seems to
be getting better (like asking for driving directions, or looking up
people from my Android’s address book), that isn’t much like “real work”
either.
I think a better interface will probably come when computers are better
able to understand our language directly, and that’ll happen about
thirty minutes before they replace us entirely, and then go back to
ignoring human language altogether because it’s so blasted inefficient
compared to their normal ways of sharing information.
Good luck.
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