What Will Replace Computer Keyboards? (xconomy.com)

jeffengel writes:Computer keyboards will be phased out over the next 20 years, and we should think carefully about what replaces them as the dominant mode of communicating with machines, argues Android co-founder Rich Miner. Virtual reality technology and brain-computer links -- whose advocates include Elon Musk -- could lead to a "dystopian" future where people live their lives inside of goggles, or they jack directly into computers and become completely "de-personalized," Miner worries.

He takes a more "humanistic" view of the future of human-machine interfaces, one that frees us to be more expressive and requires computers to communicate on our level, not the other way around. That means software that can understand our speech, facial expressions, gestures, and handwriting. These technologies already exist, but have a lot of room for improvement.
One example he gives is holding up your hand to pause a video.

Comments

Nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

What a stupid question.

Probably nothing

[sconeu]

It depends on the job, but in general, I'd say nothing.

Voice requires insane amounts of processing power compared to a keyboard, is lower bandwidth, and is difficult to use, except for normal words.

Try reading some C (or your language of choice -- except maybe Ada) out loud and see what you'd have to do to get the voice parser to recognize stuff as characters not words.

As to my bandwidth argument, a trained typist can easily type 60 characters per second (60 wpm), or better, whereas voice is much slower.

Not to mention the noise factor in an office, when someone would be using speech.

Re:Probably nothing

[bogaboga]

What Will Replace Computer Keyboards?

Question is: Do they *need* to be replaced? If so, why?

Re:Probably nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

As to my bandwidth argument, a trained typist can easily type 60 characters per second (60 wpm), or better, whereas voice is much slower.

60 words per minute or about five or six* keystrokes per second, not 60, is what the stereotypical self-taught nerd manages. That includes me: I can do a hair better but the main thing is that I can easily type without looking at the keyboard for most keys. This leaves me more room to think and possibly say useful things. A trained touch-typist should be able to do quite a bit more than that, 120-ish WPM over long stretches. Of course, that training was a little more common in the typewriter era.

Many many office people are still hunt-and-peckers, typing with two to four fingers and watching their own fingers like a hawk.** That's not productive. That's quite a lot of low-hanging fruit that could easily be reaped with a little training and without stupid fragile technology requiring stupidly big chunks of processing power.

In fact, I note that much of today's "consumer"-oriented technology is pessimised for touch-typists. You can't really do it on any touchscreen and chicklet keyboards suck too much for serious typing also.

Given the choice between re-introducing a little training and good keyboards to type on, and have world+dog yabber at each their own little screens... yeah, I can see why we're going where we're going, if we let the silly valley bunch have their way. They could be solving real-world problems, if only they'd get out of their saccharine sugarland utopia for but a week a year or so.

Not to mention the noise factor in an office, when someone would be using speech.

Those cones of silence ought to solve that.

* The "standard word" is five characters, but hitting space is another keystroke on a keyboard, if not on a morse key. With a dedicated thumb to do it, typically, so whether that counts is another discussion entirely.
** Including the bigwigs who previously would dictate their letters to trained typist secretaries. So now you want to go back and have the computer do all that typing and proofreading and other handling? But of course, friend computer knows best. How could I forget?

Hm...

[xlsior]

...There's a reason that PC keyboards are essentially the same today as they were 40 years ago -- THEY WORK, and they work well.

Speech to text, waving your hands around in the air and other innovations are cute, but all have massive downsides: can't be used in a noisy office, you can't keep waving your hands around in the air for hours on end.
Keyboards can be used in any environment, and are much less ambiguous than voice control. The same goes for mice -- trackballs, touchscreens, eye tracking, etc. have all been around for many years, all work reliably, yet none of them have any significant market share compared to the mouse.

I'm sure you can find some alternatives input methods in niche use cases (and for certain devices like mobile phones), but I'd still fully expect my 2040 computer to still be bundled with a boring old keyboard and mouse.

Re:All the above

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It seems like there are two(for broad simplification purposes, there are definitely more or at least cases that mix elements of both) 'styles' of use; one of which is fairly hard to imagine replacing keyboards in; the other much more amenable(already partially done in some cases).

There are the tasks that involve relatively precise symbol manipulation. Programming is probably the most extreme case(human readers might be disgusted by your spelling, grammer, and atrocious taste in formatting; but they are likely to understand what you meant than the compiler or interpreter is); spreadsheet data munging, word processing, and the like are the other big ones. You can substitute something for a keyboard in these cases; but it is generally pretty clunky and you really need a reason to bother. Speech-to-text, say, works; and can be a valuable assistive technology for those who can't type for one reason or another; but it isn't actually all that impressive compared to typing if you have the option of either(both because it is somewhat error prone; because some operations have extremely terse expressions on the keyboard "move right one cell" is expressed with one touch of an arrow key, which is far faster than saying it, and certainly at least as fast as even a specially defined codeword of some sort; and because people, without substantial practice, aren't terribly good at speaking the way they want to write; pauses, 'umm', etc.)

Then there are tasks that can be done by manipulating symbols; but are really about snapping together some primitives the system is already familiar with in one of a reasonably limited number of ways according to what is basically a template provided by the system. Creating a calendar event or starting a phone call are probably reasonably good examples: For a calendar event; you are snapping together one or more items from your contacts(if it's a 'reminder', it just contains you; if it's a meeting or something, it will have additional participants), a date/time, and a location(sometimes just a human-readable description intended for the participants, in company settings often a conference room or the like that is also a specialized type of contact that is known to the system so that room availability tracking works). Placing a phone call is an even simpler case: you are specifying a contact and a known operation to perform against that contact(and possibly an additional detail if the contact has a work, home, and mobile number or the like, in which case the command has to be 'call X at work').

This set of tasks is inherently somewhat limited, because (barring markedly more expert expert systems than we yet enjoy) you can really only perform them if the system already has a template defined; but many of the common cases are really, really common; so it isn't prohibitive to enumerate and support those cases; which reduces the ambiguity involved and makes it easier for a relatively imperfect input mechanism to assemble the correct answer (or at least recognize that it needs to ask you to repeat yourself) because the context automatically excludes the vast majority of possible inputs.

If your plan involves a grim future where computers are basically just for scheduling meetings and asking Alexa to buy things; it becomes much easier to imagine replacing the keyboard; but that is much less about improvements in speech to text or other new input mechanisms than it is about defining down the list of possible activities until you no longer need precision, general purpose input, or other things your alternative input mechanism is bad at.

efficiency

[Crass Spektakel]

There is only one relevant factor for computer interaction:

bandwidth.

I can type 500 characters per minute on my G80-3000 cherry keyboard with an error rate less than 1% thus producing highly complex content faster than some people can speak or listen. Also I can read text at a speed of 5000 characters per minute allowing me to consume highly complex content faster than any person alive can speak or listen. In fact I HATE youtube videos because they often need ten or twentyfold the time it takes me to read the same content from text.

Give me something which allows me to interact even faster and you got me as a customer.

But honestly I think there isn't anything close to accomplish that. Maybe we'll see direct brain links in a couple of decades but I can not even remotely imagine anything else increasing my performance.

But if your problem is not "efficency" but "made for idiots" then there might be something around the corner. Which I am not even remotely interested in.

Nothing -- have speech or pen been replaced?

[redelm]

Speech was the first communication device, ~200k years ago. Then came stylii and reed-pens ~4000 years ago and typewriters ~150 years ago. All have been improved (language precision, steel nibs 1815, electronics) but all are still around and used as appropriate.

Re: Computer keyboards will be phased out

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Answer: probably nothing. What is millennial Silicon Valley's obsession with 'replacing' things? I'm sorry all of the good concepts were already taken when you were born and all you get are incremental improvements, but 'disruption' for its own sake quickly becomes arrogance quickly becomes supremely annoying quickly becomes a dead end. The best sci-fi and speculative fiction was about solving problems that actually existed at the time, and not about manufacturing them.