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Is this the End of Typing? The Internet's Next Billion Users Want Video and Voice (foxnews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a WSJ article: The internet's global expansion is entering a new phase, and it looks decidedly unlike the last one. Instead of typing searches and emails, a wave of newcomers -- "the next billion," the tech industry calls them -- is avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images. They are a swath of the world's less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy. Incumbent tech companies are finding they must rethink their products for these newcomers and face local competitors that have been quicker to figure them out. "We are seeing a new kind of internet user," said Ceasar Sengupta, who heads a group at Alphabet's Google trying to adapt to the new wave. "The new users are very different from the first billion." A look at Megh Singh's smartphone suggests how the next billion might determine a new set of winners and losers in tech. Mr. Singh, 36, balances suitcases on his head in New Delhi, earning less than $8 a day as a porter in one of India's biggest railway stations. He isn't comfortable reading or using a keyboard. That doesn't stop him from checking train schedules, messaging family and downloading movies. "We don't know anything about emails or even how to send one," said Mr. Singh, who went online only in the past year. "But we are enjoying the internet to the fullest." Mr. Singh squatted under the station stairwell, whispering into his phone using speech recognition on the station's free Wi-Fi. It is a simple affair, a Sony Corp. model with 4GB of storage, versus the 32GB that is typically considered minimal in the developed world. On his screen are some of the world's most popular apps -- Google's search, Facebook's WhatsApp -- but also many that are unfamiliar in the developed world, including UC Browser, MX Player and SHAREit, that have been tailored for slow connections and skimpy data storage.
Watching video sucks when I want the news quickly.
Modern app appers use appboards to app apps while apping other apps!
Apps!
I've never met anyone in any age group who wants voice or video for most of their consumption. There are exceptions: how-to videos are usually more helpful than how-to directions, and voice is nice when you want to hear how something is pronounced. But you would have to be brain dead to want to favor those, as they cannot be searched, can't be digested at work and you can't skip around in them to find the little bit you need without having to take in the large amounts of bullshit, fluff, marketing and distraction.
This sounds like astroturfing, burn everyone associated with it.
Doesn't work in an office environment. Too much noise.
Voice is great on something like a Google Home or Alexa where you want an answer but not sitting in front of a keyboard.
Although then, voice recognition technology still sucks eggs. Normally takes about 4 or 5 tries to get Alexa to understand what you ask her. I'm sure with time voice recognition will eventually be acceptable, but it's still in it's infancy.
If you have a keyboard infront of you, I can't imagine anyone not preferring to use that, it's much more accurate... more private... and quieter. Can you imagine an office full of people talking to their computers concurrently?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Why do submissions like this get approved? Typing isn't going away because some poor guy in India is whispering to a cheap phone.
Seriously, this is just some push by marketroids who sold a bill of goods to media execs. They think it will let them fire journalists and print hosts and replace them with cheaper H2-B and H1-B workers and recent AV grads.
But we don't want video everywhere.
I hate stupid articles that start playing videos. I hate news showing as video when I'd rather read it and skim it.
Ad funny cartoons. We like that.
But this is so fake, and just an attempt to cut costs by firing existing print journalists and replacing them with cheaper "video" journalists.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
> avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images
Remember that scene in Idiocracy, at the hospital? Yeah, me too.
All of those "local competitors" will have to figure out a way to make money off of people who are dirt poor. But if those people have no money, how can they pay for services? It is a tale as old as time.
Meanwhile we should look for how such a thing is possible, somehow these new companies are externalizing some costs so they can exploit the market. What are they externalizing? Oh, the public services that allow the poor to access the internet, of course. When the government or other institutions subsidize internet infrastructure, you can be sure that these corporate fat cats are waiting to put the gears of exploitation into motion.
An office full of people using speech recognition won't get anything done. While the kids might be starting to realize that since they never learned how to type they can actually speak faster than they can type, they will also have to learn that they can't all be using speech recognition simultaneously in the same room.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The problem with voice recognition is that we abandoned the command-line interface too early, and that we have been hiding the concept of "commands" deeper and deeper behind our mythological "direct manipulation" interface. Because we've tricked users into believing that they are manipulating objects rather than giving linguistic commands to the computer (gestures are part of sign language, and gestures are a huge part of modern interfaces), we haven't prepared people to apply the same logic to voice commands. This means that we leave people trying to use natural language, and that makes the task so computationally intensive that it needs to be done in the cloud. Teaching people to use computers is still a more achievable task than teaching computers to understand people.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I should also point out, as someone with five languages, that you can usually work fairly well in written versions of a language you didn't grow up with, but that having to listen to audio of a language, with accents, that is not your own, is far more difficult.
A lot of people who prefer text are not native speakers of the text. They can either google translate it, or understand 95 percent of it, if it's text, but with audio and video they tend to have to listen to it 2-3 times before they understand. Have you ever watched Mandarin or Russian broadcasts where the speaker is talking quickly?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A teeming underclass only capable of reading and "writing" an ideogrammatic language whose verbalization is developed by an AI.
I'm an extremely fast typer but nowadays, when possible, I use speech to text on my phone. I wish I could use speech to text on my computer at home but I haven't looked into solutions yet.
I am usually ahead of the curve with trends, and I believe this one is very true/accurate.
They probably polled their viewers, a self-selected group of sometimes startingly gullible people.
davecb@spamcop.net
consumers then?
I'm sure it pleases the old guard we-make-you-consume media to think the new interactive media will finally work like they always wanted it to.
But then what happens to places like Facebook where you create the content and they resell it back to you?
Or have we already reached the point where most the bandwidth is TV reruns, cult hit movies and cat photos endlessly cycling around in a email echo chamber of factious realpolitik and ghettoized groupthink?
In Science fiction, we have voice control and these 3d holographic displays... It makes the future seem all cool and such however in real life it would just suck.
Voice control is mostly used as a way to push the narrative so the actor can act and we get an immediate response back.
"Computer give me all references of Darmok"
"Computer give me all references of Tenargra"
vs Select count(*) cnt, Location from UltraBigDB where data like '%Darmok%' or data like '%Tenargra%'
group by Location
having count(*) > 1
order by 1 desc
In these rooms there is so much cross chatter work would be a noisy place.
Then you have those 3d holographic displays. Looks cool on TV, and that way we can see the data, with the actors face, however having text on your normal background, will be real annoying with all the moving stuff.
2
While video has its place, so does normal text that we can read and write too.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Just like the myth that "nobody wants privacy", and "nobody cares about being spied on". This new world order didn't come about from the bottom up -- it came about from the top down, straight from billion-dollar for-profit corporations. They know they have the power to strongarm human culture into a form better suited to extracting profits, and they're using it.
I keep TELLING you people this and you keep scoffing at me. Don't you see it? Too much tech being too 'helpful'. It's making people LAZY.
... you're still on here, aren't you?
Me, I miss USENET and its comparatively civilised discussions, with user client choice and lots of snark if you fsck up. But that wasn't inclusive enough, so AOL opened the floodgates. The original SJWs, I'm telling you.
For these reasons audio and video are fine for entertainment, but they are vastly inferior to text and images as methods of information conveyance. The only times they become really useful for learning is when used as a third bandwidth channel to augment text and images. e.g. Professor writing text and drawing images on the chalkboard, while explaining things orally. Or when your vision is otherwise occupied. e.g. Listening to podcasts while driving.
shhh! This may be our justification for going back to offices with doors!
On his screen are some of the world's most popular apps -- Google's search, Facebook's WhatsApp -- but also many that are unfamiliar in the developed world, including UC Browser, MX Player
I never knew that WhatsApp was for Facebook, but I've been using MX Player for at least five years. It plays most videos files that I've put on my phone and I don't have to worry about resizing them because it lets me zoom in/out. There's probably something better out there these days, but it was the first app that I found that worked and I haven't had a reason to look for something else.
Americans, as far as I can tell, are already there. I know plenty of people who don't have computers. If they can't do something on their phone, then they don't do it. In my experience, 20-something Americans largely have trouble with typing, and of course, basic spelling and grammar.
I don't respond to AC's.
I absolutely despise video based news articles. If available, I skip straight to transcript and read that. If not, I usually skip the video. I can read far faster than I can watch the video.
Oh god, fuck UC Browser. I've had to put it on a blacklist in my JavaScript online bug reporter, because it cannot handle even the most basic of tasks without throwing a shitfit and generating countless error logs sent back to the servers. Searching around online to even find out what the browser was, and all I got was other devs complaining about the same issue before even discovering WHAT the thing even was!
My first job out of college with a brand spanking new BTech degree was in the Ministry of Defense as a Scientist B. At that time it was a "gazzetted officer" position, meaning my appointment will be published in the official government Gazette as an officer. I had the right to sign my name using green ink and "attest" the authenticity of documents for the government. I had my own rubber stamp seal! I had a rank civilian equivalent of a lieutenant. Telling so that you know it is not some very low position.
My starting pay was 1800 Rupees a month. Dollar was trading at 11 Rupees per dollar. (It is about 66 rupees/USD now) Making my pay a grand 163 USD per month. At 22 working days per month it works out to 7.5 $ a day. That a railway station coolie is making 8 $ a day is fantastic progress. Back in the day in my 163$ a month pay I could afford a charwoman who would do the dishes, do the laundry and scrub the floor with disinfectant! And I had money to spare and I lived well. Not sure that porter can afford a daily, but the country has come a long way man...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Does nobody remember they called it "The Dark Ages" because only the elite could read?
We should not discourage reading and typing. They are invaluable skills.
No you aren't using the internet to it's fullest if you're limiting yourself to just what you can get to on a smartphone with voice to text.
There is a lot you can do on a smart phone but there is even more you can't.
It's like someone on dialup today saying "we are enjoying the internet to the fullest." Sure you can still communicate with it but you're pretending a lot of things just don't exist.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
"They are a swath of the world's less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy..."
In a strange twist of irony, the 21st century will bring forth the world's most advanced technology, and will ensure that it is so idiot-proof, a fucking caveman could operate it.
Welcome to the future. Intelligence and skill, is optional.
"cheap data plans"
So not Americans.....
the last thing I need is every mutterance in my cubicle being recorded
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
As a quickreader of some sorts, (550 words a minute) I'd absolutely hate it when that billion illiterates will format the content with stupid videos, where self-important people need 15 minutes to come to the fucking point.
oh no. I will loose all my motor skills then
https://xkcd.com/1264/
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
"They are a swath of the world's less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy.
This would explain why Trump supporters troll this site so assiduously.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
How are license agreements going to go with these new users? You can't pretend they took the time to delve into that 100+ page document by clicking "I Agree" if you know they can't read. So then what is that going to look like? Are they going to make them watch a few hours of video explaining how they will be reselling the user's data? While they might just try to hide behind the same old agreements it make make court cases interesting.
"Hmm, I am having problems with this puzzle, I will check youtube for a playthrough on how to solve it."
*finds playthrough, clicks on video*
"WHATS UP GUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYS!!!!"
*close tab*
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
is that it makes machine translation a hell a lot more reliable.
What people who are deaf? What about people who are unable to speak? What about people who can speak but choose not to -- such as being in a meeting and needing those network stats right this instant?
Advertisers want us to to 100% video, all the time. Advertisers want us to do 100% speech, all the time. Very few of us in the real world want either of those things.
This is a very skewed article IMHO. All I came away from it was that a very minimum age porter in a subway and airport has a bunch of tech in his hand with todays internet where everything is mobile friendly and at his finger-tips. There is ZERO barrier to entry to get in on using top technical apps, trends or be in-the-loop. This guy is 100% right: he doesn't need to know SHIT about home-row or sending a well articulated e-mail to a boss about xyz topic. So of course typing on a keyboard is useless; it probably barely scrapes by, has a completely liquidated dirt-cheap marketed phone that gets him 'online', that's it. I bet he doesn't have a computer or a laptop because he can't afford one and all he needs to feed vindicated, fulfilled and get what he needs is in his hand on a 4" screen.
This isn't any different than the thousands of us that will make the same comparisons a little closer-to-home (so to speak) to the youth born in sub-2000's, the aging senior citizens or grandparents or maybe their own non-adopting blue-collar 9-5 parents who maybe are just ditching a flip phone without SMS even for their first smart phone(s).
You can't say end of typing is now; end of typing hasn't even exited still for hundreds of thousands of people before and after this. I certanly can't cough it up, it's how I make a living and for the majority of the tech industry and any other industry, it's not dying, but just for people who don't ever need it.
I was always a fan of the quick hard type instructions then stamp the enter key, no matter what the procedure call is still hard type instruction than stamp the enter key.
Obligitory:
Cypher: Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. II don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head.
If you want to maintain an illiterate underclass of passive users, then by all means keep degrading mainstream Internet into speech and video. Let us 1337 h4x0rs be the only ones who can read and write. Somebody needs to maintain and develop this damn thing anyway.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
No, it's not the end of typing.
I could skin through text tutorials online and find the text I wanted. Now I have to go back and forth through a video wondering if what I'm looking for is even there to begin with when I need to hear a piece again I have to rewind and listen all over. It sucks. Horribly
The question, "Is this the End of Typing?" doesn't match with the story. From what I can tell from the summary, the story seems to be about the fact that there are masses of illiterate people getting online, and it may be better to communicate with those people using audio and video, since they can't read. Also, a lot of these people are in developing countries where infrastructure isn't great, so companies wanting to service them need to find ways to provide an audio/video interaction in that context. Ok, that's fair enough. Makes sense.
But that's a far cry from saying "no one will read or write anymore".** Text is an extremely efficient and useful method of communication. The reason we haven't moved to UIs based on speech recognition and text-to-speech merely because of the technological hurdles. In many cases, it's just easier, faster, less annoying, and more private to communicate via text.
** I don't know if that's actually what the argument argues, since it's behind a paywall.
Good luck finding a video on YouTube of any complexity whose automatic captions are correct. And good luck finding a site that lets you view the automatic captions alone instead of viewing the video.
If a group that has no money is the product, to whom is the group being sold? It can't be to advertisers, as a group that has no money cannot afford the luxury items that the advertisers are promoting.
A web site that actively prevents you from using mobile browsers with it. This is genius.
Sound and video is just less convenient. It may be good for illiterate people, those without fingers or when you need to make a long detailed conversation, but it requires an environment where you may talk and listen to sound (unlike most open space environment or public place where it's either too calm or too noisy to hold a vocal conversation) and it's requires answering right now. The greatest thing about text messages is that it is direct but doesn't require immediate and complete attention. It is also true for most other uses. Like searches and everything. I never use vocal assistant because it just seems weird to start shouting orders to my phones when I could just quietly push a button or two.
An office full of people using speech recognition won't get anything done.
There's a term for an office full of people who speak into a microphone for a living: a call center. They use the speech recognition means in the brain of each customer who calls.
Even the so-called "educated" internet users can't write anymore. What they write is littered with L33t-sp34k, "teen speak", shortened words, words turned into acronyms not to mention errors, mistakes and typos. It's also already polluted by images, i.e. emojis.
The end of typing on the internet began when non-computer-nerds started using the Internet.
#DeleteFacebook
Typing, done well, is fantastic as a means to communicate to a computer. At present many who can't be bothered to learn to type well type with poor technique, slowly, and potentially risking injury. For these, voice input would be a very good idea.
John_Chalisque
What people who are deaf? What about people who are unable to speak?
They'd key in their social insurance number and receive a reasonable number of non-video views. It'd be a need-tested exception to the general rule of providing video articles and video ads, in the same way that there's a copyright exception in the United States for books on devices made available only to legally blind people.
"How to read the fucking manual"
"How to ask a question"
and "how to spot bullshit"
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
TIL there currently aren't any programming languages comprised entirely of swearing.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
With my disabilities, I don't want to talk and hear due to my impediments. I like to type and read to socialize.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So, this is like comparing UI to CLI. CLI can get far, far more done then what I've encountered in UI. For example, I'm supposed to test connectivity with HTTPS, TCP and ICMP. There isn't a way to do ICMP from the UI, and TCP and HTTPS can be done via the respective TCP client (e.g. PuTTY) and HTTPS via the browser (e.g. Chrome). But that's like 20 windows versus 10 lines of code.
Many younger people watch news and shows at double-speed. If the UI allows one to jump around easier, it could be navigated and absorbed as fast as typical text reading.
I'd personally like a brain implant to avoid typing and perhaps eye-ball-based reading: skip the middle-man. The research on "barely intrusive" implants looks promising.
Table-ized A.I.
Question: "How do I do X?"
A 4 line - do this, do that, click here, done. Not good enough.
"Do you have a video for that?"
That's modern day Silicon Valley, alright. Cater to the lowest common denominator in the name of profit rather than ecourage people to elevate themselves. Typical, infuriating. They will be their own undoing, eventually. I can't wait.
Oddly enough this was predicted by Neal Stephenson in "The Diamond Age." Where only the educated could read, while the poor still had access to technology but ironically enough not education, and so ended up using a simple pictograph system of information. That tech can spread faster than education is a sad prediction to come true.
I'm not really down with the video yet - that won't happen until it can create video specific to my request on the fly. But, I'm toatally down with talking to my phone, TV, Google Home, etc.
I really don't understand why people are still pulling their phones out of their pocket so much.
I find it easier to just say "OK Google, text I'll be there in ten to Mom". If Mom replies, Google just reads it to me.
When I want directions (which I never need but always ask for just to get warnings of traffic issues), it's just "OK Google, take me to xxxxx". And the voice directions are fine. I rarely have to look at a screen during navigation.
If I'd like to listen to some tunes, it's "OK Google, play xxxxxx from spotify".
There are few smartphone activities I can't perform more quickly with voice than text input. Need a calculation, just ask - even with pretty complex equations. Need a stock quote, ask. Need to know movie times, ask. Turn the lights on - ask. Get a wake up at 6:30 AM, ask. Remind me to get something the next time I'm in Walmart, ask.
If they would just bring all of this fully to Chrome and give the linux crowd some hooks to tie it into the desktop, I'd be very pleased. It wouldn't eliminate my typing, but it would eliminate the need to redirect my attention from the foreground app to command or get status about background activities.
That should be all we need to support illiterate users. Web sites should already be usable with screen readers used by the blind. Then the only thing necessary for illiterate users of screen readers should be voice control.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
What if you are in a room full of people all talking loudly? It would be awfully hard for a computer to isolate your voice.
Or, what if you are in a place where you have to keep quite?
Or what if you cannot speak, or speak very well.
More people in the world have a cell phone than indoor plumbing (wtf?!?). Many people in the world are illiterate or barely literate. Instead of elevating them we will dumb down the methods of spreading information to make more bucks. Sad!
I don't mind voip or video chat, but these make it impossible to search for keywords - unlike email or chatlogs.
I'm sure the cloud has a solution for that, but I so don't like the smell of that. Hosting all services myself, or using my peers servers/services, there's currently no way to search archives at all. Which is a showstopper for me.
Who ever writes a text without going back over it repeatedly to change things, correct spelling mistakes, improve the language etc, when they are writing something they hope is worth reading? Text written like actual speech may be useful in a narrative setting, sometimes, but it would be unsufferable in most other contexts, so after having used a speech-to-text interface, you will still have to go over the text and edit it heavily, using a keyboard. This kind of technology is not meant to replace existing, well-established methods, they are meant to complement them. It may make a lot of sense to have speech-to-text for when you want to take notes, but have to use your hands for mroe important things - like if you are driving, but want to note down ideas or observations along the way.
lol
Might work for stupid indians, but I don't give a duck for them. I prefer to read a thousand times more than watch videos with answers. Also, no point in using voice and opening another breach for eavesdropping.
How many times do people have to remind the editors of /. about Betteridges law?
The answer to a question asked in an article's headline is always no.