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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.
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.
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.
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! --
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?
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It always amused me that Scotty, who had apparently never touched a keyboard and mouse (let alone would have had no familiarity with the software used in the 1980s) was able to pick up that keyboard after learning voice wouldn't work, and smash away and within 5 seconds he had come up with the blue-print for transparent aluminum despite not having any knowledge of touch-typing or the software being used.
I haven't seen that in a while. But I thought he started out doing the two finger hunt an peck thing and progressed quickly. I took it as showing that Scotty was extremely adept at picking things up. Plus it's a movie, would you have stayed in the theater if it spent 45 minutes of him poking at a keyboard?
It's like when hackers on TV shows come across a network they've never seen before... smash a few keys and they're instantly connected to everything on the network and instantly know how to operate it all.
Don't forget the spinning graphics with no command line at all.
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.
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!
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.
https://xkcd.com/1264/
Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
"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
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.
Before Eternal September, USENET didn't suffer fools/trolls gladly, and back then, all it took was a couple E-mails to abuse@troll-s.isp.com, and the admins got rid of them quickly, because having one's connections to other NNTP sites pulled was a very useful tool.
To boot, USENET posts will follow you forever. Last year, during a job interview, I actually had an interviewer pull up posts from the early 1990s I had in sci.crypt and alt.sex.cthulhu...
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.
It is strange ... to look back 25 years in time and see posts that you wrote are still there. It would like be like making a sandcastle on the beach, going back and still seeing it there after all those years.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.