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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.
Talking to a computer may be a good way to enter the chemical structure of transparent aluminum, though.
Why do submissions like this get approved? Typing isn't going away because some poor guy in India is whispering to a cheap phone.
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! --
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.
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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.
shhh! This may be our justification for going back to offices with doors!
How many people have you met that are illiterate?
How many people in the world are illiterate?
It can be informative, but it can also be damn annoying.
A lot of these you-tubers make videos as if they're getting paid by the minute instead of by the views. The "how to such-and-such" video goes something like "Hi, I'm so-and-so, and welcome to my youtube channel where I talk about how to upgrade your computer and other electronic devices." [insert long pauses between some words] "Today I'm going to show you how to do such-and-such; such-and-such is useful if you want to [insert long list of things with long pauses in between them while the speaker thinks about it]."
5 minutes in, and maybe you're finally getting to the useful part. Hey, newsflash, I wouldn't have looked up your video if I didn't already know what I was looking for and why I was looking for it!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
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.