Talking to mechanical objects – less embarrassing than you’d think. (Perhaps less than it should be, sometimes…)

I was reading an article in The Economists about Hewlett-Packard and Dell, the two big American PC manufacturers. And I thought: “There probably won’t be much left of them in 5 years.” Because the pads / tablets will likely take over around then.

There are two simultaneous trends that are lifting the tabs: Improved displays, and “cloud” storage. With data stored remotely (and in some cases processed remotely), the tablet becomes mainly an interface, an input / output unit for the invisible “real” computer.

This is pretty much how it is already, and this is fine if you just want to read or watch video or play music. But the third part is on its way to join: Speech recognition technology. Today I can speak to my desktop computer and it correctly guesses 90-95% of my words. For native English speakers, the rate is 98-99%, enough that you can fire off the average email with no mistakes, and certainly fewer mistakes than if you typed it.

In contrast, when I speak English to my Android phone, I might just as well speak Norwegian for all it cares. It seems to react randomly, when it reacts at all. Again, I presume this is different for native English speakers; certainly the cool demonstration on YouTube is very different from my experience. But my point is, once the tablet has the same level of speech recognition as my desktop computer has today, or better, we will no longer depend on our sausage fingers for input.

You may think it is awkward and embarrassing to speak to an inanimate object in public, but a large number of cell phone owners seem to disagree with you. In fact, some of them seem almost immune to embarrassment, but let’s skip that topic for today. I agree that you would probably not want to address your tablet on the subway and say “search Google for Russian bride pictures”, even if you were working on a thesis about the change in Russian wedding customs at the end of the Soviet era. On the other hand, if you are at the office you probably won’t have any problem with saying “open spreadsheet Johnson & Johnson 2015 April summary”.

OK, perhaps 2015 is a bit optimistic. After all, it took more than 4 years for Dragon NaturallySpeaking to reach its current near perfection on the PC, and it was at least good for entertainment when I first got it, even if it wasn’t actually useful if you had hands. But the listening (and hopefully obeying) datapad definitely be in the near future. If we have a future at all… Opinions on this seems to vary lately?