I am starting to wonder if I might 1 day Not need to type anymore. instead, I can simply speak to my phone. my phone or other device will do the typing for me. the technology is getting quite advanced. as a matter of fact, I am speaking through my phone right now. I can see there are small problems gwip the text, but overall you should be able to understand what I am saying. some words are not quite correct. 4 example, the first letter at the beginning of a sentence should contain a capital letter. and for numbers that are less than 21 would expect the numbers to be spelled. but with some practice it seems evidence thats I can speak through my phone and can avoid typing. is this soon going to change the face of the internet?
Interesting question. My girl-friend just tried this out on her new Nokia she picked up today, worked quite well actually. Perhaps in a few years it will be good enough to replace some typing related tasks. But I can’t imagine it ever (within reasonable timeframe) replacing it completely. I’m still picky about details and want to edit the punctuation, dashes etc, which I believe would be difficult through speech unless the engine is very smart and proper. Writing code is another scenario that typing would likely be necessary for. Anyway, just my thoughts. 
I’m sure one day we can forget about typing
currently some sites offer online text to speech conversion and they do it just fine
I have tried out voice as a replacement for typing on a number of occasions since 1994 and on none of the tries has it been successful. In fact the latest try was no different in terms of success than the first. At the current rate of progress I don’t expect to see voice completely replace typing. It may do for a few specialised uses but not for most things.
I see the uptake of voice control for the majority of tasks as being similar to many over hyped ‘revolutions’ in communication (e.g video calling)
-
First it’s invented, but the bandwidth, cpu processing and quality isn’t there, so only early adopters experiment with it, and it stays on the back burner for years.
-
Then the quality improves and it reaches a natural low percent position amongst input methods as most people realise it’s unsuited for day to day use, but it’s handy sometimes.
-
Then apple claims to have invented it, puts it in the latest itoy, and the blogosphere and twitter hipsters gush about how it’s going to change everything.
-
The world at large realises it’s a load of overhyped twaddle and go back to using keyboards and mice.
If I’m out in public I’d much rather type than speak, for privacy.
The brain might actually replace the keyboard and the voice… technology to read minds.
Its no more a imagination but coming truth when things will become so hi tech that there will be no keyboards, no mouse only touch screen equipments or on the more modified form equipments working on voice command and notice your retina movement on screen and place the cursor accordingly.
This technology is still in its early stages right now, I believe it will improve as time goes by. Will it replace typing completely? I do not think so, some messages that you will want to send are better being typed instead of spoken. Or if you are not in the mood to say anything, typing will still be better.
A technology that will write messages dictated by your brain, that’s what I will be waiting for!
New? I wouldn’t call this new.
People are using Dragon Naturally Speaking today, and have been for years actually.
People using it have many of the same accessibility problems as users of other types of assistive technology like screen readers.
I sure has heck wouldn’t want to write code in it. But there are people who have.
I’ve tried voice activated devices, and while they work okay in principle, type is never going to go extinct. It’s obviously much much more convenient in so many more cases than it is to talk - for example - look at everyone texting and facebooking but they could never actually talk to anyone.
Nah I don’t think typing will ever fully die. But I do expect voice will really start to pick up.
The other problem with using voice is it’s just impractical in many situations. For example, consider a school computer lab. 20+ computers in one room. If all of those people were talking to their computer, you wouldn’t be able to hear yourself think… and the computer would probably get interference all the time. Same with an office setting. I think we’ll always have to type (until maybe the brain reading stuff =p), because you just can’t talk all the time.
I don’t think it will replace typing so much as replace the ability for those who can not. Dragon is a great software for people who can not physically type or for those who find it easier to speak than to type. Yes there are times when you can’t really speak because you need privacy, thus typing etc. But all in all Dragon has been around for a while and is a great program that’s just getting better
sure oneday definitely voice replace the typing n its great…
This technology is in its testing phase. I’m not sure but one or two Japanese companies are working it very seriously and I am sure they will succeeded within 2-3 years.
There has been some significant advances in this area, such as “siri” on the iPhone 4S with the ability to understand what you are saying and actually perform tasks for you (write emails, text people, create contacts etc…). But I don’t think that same technology is coming to the average PC any time soon, for reasons noted above. Also I’m not sure if there will ever be a perfect system that will actually get the punctuation correct.
Xrtanormal.com says “If you can type, you can make movies”. Their synthetic voice movies are hilarious, mostly because the synthesizer does not recognize the inflections and cadence of spoken language. Even when we read printed media, our brains add the inflection for us. A simple exercise: The short sentence, “I love you.”
Say the sentence three times, putting the inflection on a different word. The meaning is changed.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
This is why I believe that computer generated speech will never replace print.
Its a advance thought. Now samsung has a lunch a cell phone that has the option of repetition.One day it will generate the phone that can type hearing the voice only.
you’re right… every person has a different voice pattern and pronunciation of certain words thus making it difficult for voice to replace typing. typing is more accurate in terms of wanting to place your words and everything else in writing. but with voice i observed that its only good for a couple of applications but not perfect for speech to text application.