Slashdot Mirror
A New Paradigm For Web Browsing
dsaci points out a New York Times article about how surfing the web may change to a more graphics-based endeavor. With the advent of devices like the Wii and the iPhone, the capability to directly control objects on a screen is becoming a popular and affordable technology. That, combined with immersive interfaces such as Piclens, could be the future of web browsing. Quoting:
"'I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago,' said Austin Shoemaker, a former Apple Computer software engineer and now chief technology officer of Cooliris. 'People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.' Voice, too, is finally beginning to play a significant role as an interface tool in a new generation of consumer-oriented wireless handsets. Many technologists now believe that hunting and pecking on the tiny keyboards of cellphones and P.D.A.'s will quickly give way to voice commands that will return map, text and other data displayed visually on small screens."
As long as a lot of people are still on dial-up this will not be able to be a big thing.
Talk is cheap. All this balderdash about next-gen interfaces, 3D, voice control, blah-blah-blah and how your great ideas will revolutionize the industry. Well, let's see it! How about some examples? The windowed GUI was an obvious quantum improvement for the vast majority of computer users (yes, I realize that on /. command line is king) but there has been no movement forward for nearly 20 years. Most importantly, the GUI window paradigm worked well. Let's see your prototypes rather than just more "big ideas" or is this simply a rehash of the "one day we'll have flying cars" speech, applied to computers?
I have to admit that I didn't agree with his ideas, but Jef Raskin, RIP, (original concept for Macintosh, "Swyft", "Canon Cat") was one of the few designers who was brave enough to take a clean-slate approach to interface design and then *implement* it to see if the ideas stood up to real-world use.
voice recognition won't be useful until it is intelligent.
voice recognition won't be useful until either
a) the computer understands what you're talking about, which will take forever to achieve or
b) the current paradigm, which you summarize so aptly -- voice being used to interact with items made specifically for interaction using your hands -- dies, and is replaced with an interface that is designed to supplement hands with voice. even the Orson Card's "vocalisation" interface makes more sense than what's currently available to use.
IMHO (b) will come first, and may become very good before we're any close to a reasonable (a).
Piclens looks cool and all, but it's just a proprietary program (like Google Earth, really) that happens to run in a web browser.
Want to use it on Linux? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's Win/Mac only for now; they say there'll be a Linux port one day; but as this is a proprietary technology, you won't get Linux support until they deign to implement it.
Want to use it with Opera? Sorry, you're out of luck, it's IE/Safari/Firefox only for now; and it will probably remain so, as they say they're not interested in supporting minority browsers; and as it's a proprietary technology, Opera can't add their own support for it.
Want to use it on an iPhone? Sorry...
This is not a step forward.
I don't know. In the 80s, back in the days of MS-DOS, I vowed never to switch from a CLI. A GUI (on a regular PC) was not only slow as molasses, I could think and type faster on a keyboard than use those new-fangled things called mice. I bought one just for the heck of it. It came with a primitive paint program and a TSR for shortcuts. I figured it'd have a niche but it would never hit mainstream. I wasn't the only one who felt that way. There's a lot of skepticism judging from the posts so far, but who knows? Resistance is normal I guess at the start. We'll have to wait and see.
But what REALLY gets to me is when the device just quetly hangs once it's gone into standby mode. With the phones, it meant I silently dissapeared off the cell network until I realised there was a problem, which is usuazlly when I try to use the device.
I have some friends with the newer HTC phones, and they report that WM6 seems to be more stable, but a few of them have reported serious problems with battery life.
I think there are a lot of things we need to sort out with mobile devices before we look at redoing the interface.
The keyboard works, 100% of the time. Its easily understood. Its robust. It fails gracefully - you immediately see if you've made a mistake before submitting a command.
True, but they should be focusing on other methods of input.
This could be anything from the one handed keyboard, ear canal senor that detects tongue movement, or mouse cursor that follows eye movement.
Personally, I'd wouldn't mind having an electrode in my arm or back if it means I could use small muscle movements to input text and mouse movement but that might be a hard sell to the average joe.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Well, the problem with that is that you have to look at the darned device to do anything. Speaker independent voice recognition works quite well already on a Nokia N95. You hold a button, speak a name from your address book, and it not only displays and speaks what it thinks you want for confirmation, but it also has a list of next best guesses. You're not going Captain Picard with the thing, but it works well with minimal input. In noisy areas, just hold it close and speak up. You can't say that with most "smart" phones like iPhone and it doesn't demand your eyeballs if, for instance, you really need to place a call while driving. I use it all the time in preference to the keyboard because it beats flipping through the hundreds of address book entries in my phone. I like that direction in UI and hope we continue to see more of it rather than dwell on how glossy and cool our phones look.
I've seen phones of all sorts crash, you obviously haven't used many phones. Symbian will crash and burn at least as well as Windows Mobile when running nonstandard apps. But that comes with the territory of Java and mass availability of custom third party apps.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
..and marketing. The people with the most money as a sort of general rule of thumb are all older, and starting to feel the effects of such things as arthritis and failing eyesight. Typing on teeny keyboards (or any keyboards for that matter) is something that starts to suck eventually, and a good quality voice activated system will sell by the millions. And a lot of places are making texting while driving an actual criminal offense, because it is dangerous, about the same statistically as drinking and driving, another place where vocal interface will be welcomed.
And BTW, it will be developed whether you approve of it or not, or think only keyboards are the one and only answer (here ya go, put up or shut up, give up your mouse 100% right now and forever if you don't believe me and insist on just keyboards). The potential payout for the devs/companies who nail vocal interface is in the billions.
I type over 70 WPM using what you term muscle twitches. With a very small amount of training I can use voice recognition software at over 160 WPM and it doesn't involve strain (other than the mental "strain" of enunciating). Aside from that, nothing is ever misspelled (homonyms and other nuances are all you must worry about).
/. ... or if not you'll sure send them a text message using T9 instead of just pounding out each letter individually. Tell Fisher Price about that.
People talk all day (ask my mother-in-law) without losing their voice or straining any muscles, but have you ever typed literally all day? It is unreasonable to expect someone to type as fast as they can dictate with the same amount of training in each.
On Vista saying "open notepad" is much faster than trying to remember where it is buried on the menu. People can pick up a mic with a list of key words in front of them and more easily use the computer than they could with a mouse. Other just touching what they want instead of determining the difference between left-click, right-click, double-click, drag, etc... This is the reason that programming languages that read closer to English are usually more popular, they're simply easier to pick up and understand. Nobody wants to remember syntax.
Maybe you shouldn't talk about things you have no experience in, let alone try to make analogies that bare no relevance to the discussion. Maybe your closed-mindedness is the reason that interfaces haven't changed much, but I'm willing to bet that you will get on your Iphone and call all your friends to discuss how stupid this poster named OMNI-something was on
Input for the future?
Touch screens are where it's going. Keyboards have peaked. Still dominant for the next 20 years, but declining. Touch screens are here now, and will continue to grow more important for us. Voice has some problems. Background noise is too prevalent. Can't get rid of it in lots of environments. That is a problem that isn't solved yet. Someday, voice will be the major input system. Not yet. Current accuracy is only in the low 90% range. That is just not good enough.
I expect to see touch screens on all laptops, and on more and more monitors in the near future. That is where we already are for PDA's, and more and more phones. Touch is easy, voice is hard.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute, the "advanced typists" can achieve 120 wpm, and average (touchtypers) can achieve 50-70 wpm. It also says that conversations are held at 200 wpm. It seems like advancing speech recognition to work at conversation speeds with accuracy would yield an increase of between 2 and 4 times in efficiency. Who are you defining as average? record holders?
Maybe for now your muscle memory does common tasks with a keyboard better than with speaking, but I am certain that if you actually had reliable tools with speech recognition, you would have memory to do the same things with speech commands.
Improvements for typing:
keep keyboard constant for familiarity
touch type
use non qwerty keyboard
customize things to auto-expand short hand and abbreviations
Note that almost all of these things are aided or require a dedicated system for typing, and are not easily portable.
Improvements for speech recognition:
better software
better microphone
I think that speech recognition holds far more potential for improvement by programmers today.
I have been intrigued by the iPod Touch, and have thought of getting one. My problem is that I would want to use it as a small tablet machine at home with the WiFi for browsing the web conveniently. It could be very useful for that. Unfortunately, Apple seems to have used the 'It runs MacOS X' bullet point only as marketing hype. Sure, a portable web pad would be cool, but without the extensiblity of third party apps it would be a stunted dead-end device.
I maintain a small collection of Palm III devices (and will for the forseeable future as they are $5-15 devices on eBay now) and carry one wherever I go, because it is an extendable device with lots of third party apps and Code Warrior for when I want to write my own. It's slow and underpowered, but that means I only have to replace the two AAA batteries every three months. It's damned durable compared to later generation Palm devices, two of which I destroyed carring in my pocket before moving back to the Palm III with it's hard plastic case (overengineered and they'll not make one like it again- it doesn't sell replacements fast enough.)
I definitely wouldn't want to use an iPod Touch as a phone. And the iPod-ness also repels me, I don't want to put Itunes on any hardware I own, and don't want to spend the time to set up third party apps simply to access the thing fully. I don't want to start out with a device that right up-front sticks barriers in the way of usability.
The keyboard doesn't fit 100% of situations. You need space for it. It needs a surface and it needs two hands. You can't keep a keyboard in your pocket. You need to look at the screen for accuracy, but learners need to look at the keys. It takes a relatively long time to learn. You can't use a keyboard while walking, secretively, or holding something else. Oh, and RSI.
Alternative input devices are needed. The keys on your mobile phone are fine for dialling numbers, but you'd never even think of using them to write a novel longer than 160 characters. Go download dasher and think how faster it is to learn when you are looking at the controls. And how fast you could get using your thumb or finger to steer it on.
We will probably be pounding keys at our electric typewriters at our desks for many years. But if you're stuck at a keyboard, you're stuck sitting down. The debate is how to free users from such restrictions.
This message was entered by punching tape.
Well in response to your argument, there are good statistical models, that combined with dictionary checking, could input the correctly spelled query based on the context of the surrounding text. The user would then visually verify the query and then submit. I've seen some fellow students playing with this on a shitty mic for medical stuff and it works fairly well with a few conditions. One is that the system needs to be trained for each user's voice. The next is that they haven't used the system in a noisy environment. In terms of usability, these systems appear to be best used in isolation, like if you're in an office on a car and your hands are otherwise preoccupied. They would not work well in a customer service environment, where mistakes could make the service look stupid(er), or a factory like environment where you have many people shouting in to mics. Overall, I don't think it's a replacement for the keyboard, rather an addon to support additional input features at the user's discretion. If the user implements it over a tiny keyboard in certain conditions, then that indicates that there is some utility for such a device.