4 ms·

A large number of smartphones still have keyboards because it is a faster way to type. Maybe this will change with advances in speech recognition, but most peop

A large number of smartphones still have keyboards because it is a faster way to type. Maybe this will change with advances in speech recognition, but most people I know type much more on their netbooks than with their smartphones.

dasil003 16y ago
Speech recognition will never make the need for good text entry go away simply because people do not want to speak their private thoughts out loud in public.
- philwelch 16y ago
  In addition to that problem, typing is faster than talking; writing and speaking are for many people completely different modes of thinking with their own voice and diction; going back and editing is too awkward and difficult with speech recognition--for instance, adding this very phrase after typing out much more of my post would have probably been more effort than it was worth, as would have been reorganizing this ugly block of text into some sort of list; talking out loud takes more energy and dries out your mouth; dozens of people in an office together can all type without bothering each other very much; people with funny accents, speech impediments, very bad colds, or who have lost their voice can type more easily than their voices can be transcribed even by a skilled human transcriptionist, much less a speech recognition engine; there are fundamental complications with speech recognition, such as capitalization, punctuation, syntax, use of proper names, neologisms, and other terms unfamiliar to the engine, as well as distinguishing commands to the speech recognition engine from speech to be recognized and transcribed, and all of these complications can be easily resolved in any arbitrarily user-defined fashion whilst typing--for instance, my choice to write the bulk of this post as a single sentence consisting of multiple independent clauses strung together with semicolons would be more difficult to implement in any speech-recognition engine; and finally, many people who learned the language from books more than from speech don't even know how to pronounce certain words they have only seen in print and would have their vocabularies reduced tremendously if restricted to speech recognition--as an example, it wasn't until college until I learned the correct pronunciation of the word "albeit", a word which I have seen far more often in print than I have ever heard it said out loud, reflecting my earlier point about how people's spoken diction often differs from their written diction.
jsz0 16y ago
Depends on the individual. I'm much faster on a good software keyboard with auto-correct and tap-to-complete. There's a ton of room for improvement and innovation in soft keyboards too. I'm not sure replicating a physical keyboard on-screen is even the optimal approach. In 5 years we might have soft keyboards that barely resemble a QWERTY keyboard. Especially on tablet devices with more screen space to play with. I think the next incremental step is probably grammar / style correction based on analyzing your writing style. For power users who need to do heavy duty text input on mobiles you could have a short hand style input system that allows you to input text at brain speed to be revised before sending into a proper language. You might switch between all these different software input types for different tasks. I don't think physical keyboards will disappear anytime soon but they may increasingly become a security blanket in the form of a Bluetooth keyboard you keep in your back pack just in case.

dasil003 16y ago

Speech recognition will never make the need for good text entry go away simply because people do not want to speak their private thoughts out loud in public.

philwelch 16y ago
In addition to that problem, typing is faster than talking; writing and speaking are for many people completely different modes of thinking with their own voice and diction; going back and editing is too awkward and difficult with speech recognition--for instance, adding this very phrase after typing out much more of my post would have probably been more effort than it was worth, as would have been reorganizing this ugly block of text into some sort of list; talking out loud takes more energy and dries out your mouth; dozens of people in an office together can all type without bothering each other very much; people with funny accents, speech impediments, very bad colds, or who have lost their voice can type more easily than their voices can be transcribed even by a skilled human transcriptionist, much less a speech recognition engine; there are fundamental complications with speech recognition, such as capitalization, punctuation, syntax, use of proper names, neologisms, and other terms unfamiliar to the engine, as well as distinguishing commands to the speech recognition engine from speech to be recognized and transcribed, and all of these complications can be easily resolved in any arbitrarily user-defined fashion whilst typing--for instance, my choice to write the bulk of this post as a single sentence consisting of multiple independent clauses strung together with semicolons would be more difficult to implement in any speech-recognition engine; and finally, many people who learned the language from books more than from speech don't even know how to pronounce certain words they have only seen in print and would have their vocabularies reduced tremendously if restricted to speech recognition--as an example, it wasn't until college until I learned the correct pronunciation of the word "albeit", a word which I have seen far more often in print than I have ever heard it said out loud, reflecting my earlier point about how people's spoken diction often differs from their written diction.

jsz0 16y ago

Depends on the individual. I'm much faster on a good software keyboard with auto-correct and tap-to-complete. There's a ton of room for improvement and innovation in soft keyboards too. I'm not sure replicating a physical keyboard on-screen is even the optimal approach. In 5 years we might have soft keyboards that barely resemble a QWERTY keyboard. Especially on tablet devices with more screen space to play with. I think the next incremental step is probably grammar / style correction based on analyzing your writing style. For power users who need to do heavy duty text input on mobiles you could have a short hand style input system that allows you to input text at brain speed to be revised before sending into a proper language. You might switch between all these different software input types for different tasks. I don't think physical keyboards will disappear anytime soon but they may increasingly become a security blanket in the form of a Bluetooth keyboard you keep in your back pack just in case.