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.

Comments

Sounds made up

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

No, not the end. Next question.

[damn_registrars]

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.

Video and voice suck, text and images are fine

[Solandri]

The difference stems from

• The maximum speed at which your brain can process audio and convert it to information is fairly low. For myself, it's about 2x real-time. Any faster and I can't make out the words. 1.7x is a more comfortable limit. By contrast, your brain is much quicker at processing visual information. I can read about 5x faster than I can listen to someone talk. And I know lots of people can read even faster (my brain tries to insert inflection to give the text more context and slows me down, probably a result of me playing the piano so inserting "feeling" comes naturally).
• You cannot "zoom out" of audio to get a big picture overview of what's being said. You can zoom out (literally) of images, and view a bunch of thumbnail images at once, quickly find the image you're looking for, and zoom in to the full size image to see more detail. Likewise you can skim text to figure out the content of each paragraph, and quickly skip ahead or behind to a paragraph with the info you're looking for. You can't do this with audio (and by extension, video whose information is conveyed via audio). The best you can do is fast-forward, then play a segment at normal (or 2x speed) so you can listen to the audio, guess if you haven't fast-forwarded enough or need to rewind, and repeat. That process is much slower than locating relevant information visually.
• Related to the previous bullet, audio is one dimensional. That is fine when you want to listen to the whole thing. But it hampers searches. Text and images are two dimensional, allowing you to scan along an extra dimension if you wish to skip over a lot of stuff quickly. (Though it can become a detriment if you need to review everything.)

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.

Re:No, they don't.

[freeze128]

I'm annoyed by news articles that have ONLY video, and no text description. Especially articles whose headlines seem to be globally important. For example: on CNN's website, an article headline reads "North Korea says that US will 'Pay Dearly'".

No, it's not.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.