(Oops, forgot to post this. Moving from “draft” to “published”. Sigh…) One of my high school teachers once told me that he didn’t plan on teaching his son how to type because it would only be a year or two before we’d be interacting with computers by speech and they’d stop including keyboards. In his opinion, typing would shortly become a quaint anachronistic skill. Oh well for that.
The pull of the future is too great, and so for the jillionth time I read today in Slashdot how the cellphone keypad will be reinvented or replaced altogether.
Mobience, which is based in South Korea, has redesigned the ABC and Qwerty key layout, and come up with MobileQwerty. It’s essentially the same three-letters-per-key system as the standard mobile keypad layout, but the letters have been rearranged in a Qwertyesque way to increase efficiency. The other system developed by Nuance is a mobile speech platform that turns speech into text and replaces the keypad altogether.
The first is an incremental layout change, and the second seems as unlikely as my teacher’s Star-Trekian fantasy. I have an idea: what if you could speak directly into your cell phone and then your speech was converted into signals and then those signals were converted to speech on the other end and the listener could just listen to the words without reading them? That would be exactly what we have right now.
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