Blogs Will the keyboard be dead in ten years time?

I've put far too much effort into learning to type to allow the keyboard to become obsolete.

 

Yeah... somehow, I doubt it.

He mentions (in the video) the absurdity of a keyboard and screen - how they aren't even in the same plane. What he doesn't touch on, however, is a very important concept: Feedback. When I type a key, I feel it depress and then stop and hear a clicky sound, along with the obvious appearing of characters. Even on a touchscreen keyboard, I feel the physical contact with the screen. In the handwavey interface he demonstrates, the only feedback he's getting is visual, and visual feedback for kinetic input is at least twice as bad as the metaphor shear caused by two different planes.

Also, how, precisely, am I supposed to write this without a keyboard?

Code:

 // update mapMatrix with chosenFilter
for(int i = 0; i < mapMatrix.getX(); i++)
{
    for(int j = 0; j < mapMatrix.getX(); j++)
    {
        outMap[i][j] = applyFilter2D(chosenFilter, mapMatrix, i, j);
    }
}

I'm open to suggestions, but somehow I don't see waving my hands around in the air getting as user-friendly and fast as a keyboard any time soon, especially when it comes to non-English text work such as coding.

 

To me voice recognition and touchscreens are what motion controllers are for gaming; a gimmick and/or good for special tasks, but definitely not a replacement

 

QFT.

Well, that bit is easier. Because programming basically consists of a very simple and predictable grammar with a limited command set (nothing like the complex grammar and 50.000 plus words of an average language) you could in principle use building block icons. Remember: every computer program, no matter how complex, can basically be reduced to a flowchart diagram. So you should be able to write programs in almost the same way as you build a flowchart.

 

While i can certainly see the keyboard's role in computing diminishing, perhaps vanishing in physical form to be replaced by a touchscreen, the simply typing interface will likely last forever. the fact is, voice recognition will always be awkward at best, typing will always be faster, and there really is no easy alternative, perhaps handwriting by stylus, but many people use keyboards because handwriting is more difficult for them.

 

Keyboards and mice will not go away for a long time.
How do I know?
Just try to imagine a room of 30 cubicles with 30 people using any of this technology for 8 hours a day.


Besides, according to many of the same people promoting these alternative methods of input, the PC was supposed to be dead already. Or never have gotten started. None of this will be changed significantly until you make it easier, cheaper, and better than a mouse and keyboard. Which happen to work quite well.

 

It won't die, we'd be exhausted if we had to wave our arms around all the time.

 

when I was working at the irs.. there was thousands of computers and a bunch of data processing- if people mail in their taxes you still need to get them in the database and nothing beats a keyboard.. what this guy is doing is shenanigans xD

it's cool but it's not going to work.. I think he likes to work with his hands- enough said.. like bet he has a virtual hands on the brain even in the bathroom

 

Ever tried developing an IVR application using Envox Studio (works pretty much as you describe)? I wouldn't wish that for my worst enemy.

 

i dont like the iphone/ipad onscreen keyboards because its 100 times easier to feel the keys, and type away
try typing without looking at a touch screen keyboard, and watch yourself fail

maybe keyboards will dissapear when voice recognition comes in, but even still techies will need a keyboard for more complex input

cout << "Hello World!\n" ;
spoken as -> letter c, string out, symbol left arrow, symbol left arrow, symbol quotation, string Hello World, symbol exclamation, symbol backslash, letter n symbol quotation, symbol semi-colon

SOUNDS like keyboards are around to stay

 

At the rate oil prices (and therefore the cost of technology) are going up at the moment and are likely to continue to do so, we are more likely to be using typewriters then some fancy touch UI in ten years time

Jokes aside though, we will still be using keyboards for the duration of our life's at least, for reason robots already stated in his post above.

 

Keyboards will go away when brain reading tech comes into play.

Even so some will prefer keyboard then, because brain reading tech might cause inappropriate content to appear on screen.

 

I'd like to give this kind of technology and forward thinking a lot more credit. There are a lot of companies out there trying to figure out a "better way." To relate it to gamers, just look at Nintendo with the DS and then the Wii. Soon to follow was Natal and the Playstation Move. Voice recognition and touch technologies continue to improve. Tablets you can digitally write on continue to grow in popularity. These technologies are not replacing what already exists, but they are co-existing and supplementing them. Over the course of time they will become more commonplace and eventually may even approach eliminating them.

Do not misunderstand.

That is not to say that they will be completely eliminating those technologies. There will always be a place for the old tools. They will not ever go away completely. People haven’t completely forsaken their televisions because of Betamax, or VHS, or DVD’s or TiVo, or Hulu. These technologies simply improve what already exists which is exactly what this guy is talking about.

To say that a room of 1000 IRS workers entering data can't get rid of their keyboards simply is not a forward thinking way of looking at the situation. I am absolutely certain there is a better way of doing that kind of work. The problem is that will likely be expensive to implement in the short term. The technology is currently unwieldy and awkward. Most people aren’t in good enough shape to use these kind of systems for extended periods of time anyway. That may sound like a problem, but to me it sounds more like a solution to America’s growing obesity problem. Over the course of time I would not be the least bit surprised to see whatever the IRS currently uses for their systems slowly evolve into something completely different than what they use now. My guess is the IRS will not be an early adopter of the technology and the private sector will do most, if not all, of the leg work But whether it is five years, fifteen years, or fifty years is anyone’s guess but change will come. To say that the keyboard will be around forever is like saying the stone arrowhead won't ever be replaced by something better.

It’s not a matter of if it will be replaced..... Only a matter of when and by what.

 

Except that Tim Danton has form on this, banging on about laptops being the future and replacing everything then changing his mind two years down the line, so I'd take any prediction of his with a sea of salt now.

The keyboard's main evolution has been the connection interface and that's about it, and mobo makers have been reluctant to kill off the PS/2 port even if they might only put one on there nowadays. I certainly don't want to get rid of something with a 30-year economy of scale that makes the replacement cost as low as a fiver.

 

atm, no, unless something comes out in multi-touch/gesture-based control that is revolutionary on itself (multi-touch is promising,gesture-based control is promising, but alot still needs to be done imo). but technically its hard to guess.

 

All these videos of new technology are great, and wow etc, but they're all only really useful for CAD apps, or presentation etc. I'm sorry, but they'll all be utterly useless for typing your dissertation, or even tapping in some 1337 speak gibberish on /b/. For that, you need a keyboard.

So.. even if the tech for stuff like this becomes cheap and affordable, you'll still need a keyboard attached to your machine for whenever you need to type actual words.

 

If the keyboard is dead in ten years I'll eat my TF2 hats.

 

Keboards will not be dead in ten years time. The reasons have been discussed already. Pook makes a very good point above. I watched Steve Jobs interviewed at both D1 and D8 recently, and at D1 (2003) he was asked about input methods. I think what he said to distinguish between the usefulness of handwritten input and keyboard input 7 years ago is very relevant to this discussion:

"I think it's about handwriting input versus a keyboard, and handwriting recognition has been tried over and over again, and it turns out that Apple, after all that pain we went through with the Newton, has the best handwriting technology in the world now. It's way better than anything else. But the problem is that doesn't matter, it's still really slow to write stuff. You could never keep up with your email if you had to write it all out. And so, it turns out that people want keyboards. When I started in this business one of the biggest challenges was that people couldn't type, and one day we realised that death would eventually take care of this! And so, people know how to type now and if you do email of any sort of volume you have to have a keyboard. So we look at the tablet and we think it's going to fail."

I put the last bit in just for fun He was actually referring to Microsofts handwritten input tablet, which Bill Gates had demonstrated the previous night at D1, and Walt Mossberg was discussing with Jobs.

 

I don't think nothing will ever beat a keyboard for text input. Seeing as voice recognition requires you to access a different part of your brain when outputting content, at least for me the text and thought flows better while using a keyboard, also works as a great filter as all your thoughts don't get through. Just imagine how many "umm", "errr" etc. you hear everyday in peoples speech.

 

While keyboards may be on the way out I highly doubt that touch devices/software keyboards will replace them. The hardware keyboard is very efficient yet these touch keyboard are a sidewards move at best. they also take up part of the screen when you want to type. While i disagree that touch keyboards on screen will be a successor, a true successor, I feel, will come in the form of the wii remote. Not a wii remote in its current carnation, but a device that uses sensors, IR or not, to detect movement. Sorta minority report style. It will take a large leap in the 3D market but it is an area that alot of focus is being put into. Another area that could still improve if software develops is voice commands. The biggest problem here as you know I accounting for so many local variations of the same language as well as accents. 10 years time who knows?