Slashdot Mirror
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.
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! --