Courier killed, iPad to blame?

[Lotus Esprit]

Originally Posted by scottjl

ok, but can you imagine everyone in an office of cubicles talking to their computer at the same time? what if someone stops in your office to talk to you and your computer starts thinking they are giving it commands? without a completely 100% accurate AI to interpert the context of what is being said there will always be a need for a keyboard and pointing device. and when we get that 100% accurate AI, humans better watch out!

voice recgonition has been around since the 80's, it still hasn't hit mainstream. it's good for things like voice menus on phones, general dictation software, maybe even some games. but it falls flat on many other tasks. how would you organize your photo albums? play freecell? navigate a hard disk of folders to find a file you want? at best, voice recgonition is going to augment our existing input methods, i don't think it will ever replace them entirely.

I am sure that the software will have evolved to the point where it can distinguish between different voices. In 25 years the keyboard and traditional pointing devices will have gone into the history books.

The real hold up on voice recognition is CPU power, it just isn't there yet but at its current pace of development it will be by the end of this decade.

As far as everyone being in cubicles talking at once, they already do that now on the phone.

[Lotus Esprit]

Originally Posted by Crowl

Certainly in europe the majority of people tend to work in offices that are at least somewhat open-plan rendering voice control pretty useless there. so it's not just on the plane that it wouldn't work, just imagine the chaos when the person with the overly loud voice needs to reboot their machine all afternoon.

Voice control has times when it can be useful e.g. voice dialing on your phone when driving, but it simply isn't a control method that will be useful enough for full mainstream usage and it doesn't seem that likely that it will be heavily pursued when there is still plenty of room for touch interfaces to keep improving.

It will be pursued as it has been imagined forever. You need to let go of interacting with your computer the way that you do now. In the future the computer will be able to respond with voice as well. It will evolve to a true AI.

[scottjl]

Originally Posted by Lotus Esprit

As far as everyone being in cubicles talking at once, they already do that now on the phone.

there's a difference between a human sitting in a room of cubicles and being able to listen to a single conversation and a computer doing so.

It will be pursued as it has been imagined forever. You need to let go of interacting with your computer the way that you do now. In the future the computer will be able to respond with voice as well. It will evolve to a true AI.

in the future we'll all be parking our flying cars in our garages too. lol. you might not be old enough to remember when quite a few people argued that we needed to let go of our ground-based cars, because the future was right around the corner.

i'll let go of my keyboard and mouse, just as soon as you fly on over with your voice controlled AI system. unless they go terminator and kill us all. i'm old, hopefully i'll be dead by then anyway.

ps. soilant green is people!

[kissyfish]

Originally Posted by dmaul1114

I'm basically just waiting for something that's similar in form factor to the iPad, but an inch or so bigger and has an open OS, accessible file system etc.

I could not agree more. I did buy an iPad, as I really wanted to do simple things, from the conveniecne of my comfy chair (a laptop on my lap does not qualify as convenient for me, but it is just my opinion).

What the iPad does, it does very well, as most apple products do. I do wish the screen were an inch or two bigger, so pdfs coulf be displayed full size, and I would love an open system, as I mess around with some development, but don't really want to learn objective-c.

But for now, I am very pleased with the device, I can sit in my chair and surf the web, view technical pdfs fine, do my email, and maybe play a game.

I do wish that iBooks supported pdfs, as I really like turning a page rather than scrolling, but that is fairly minor.

[rock]

To the imagine all the people talking in their cubicle's.

Doesn't that happen now?

I have worked in a call center before, it is called noise canceling headsets. The customer does not hear the 6 people around you talking at all. You become used to it and is not a factor at all. So it should not cause an issue if you are using a dictation software to type. Of course certain positions will not be able to use it (like a call center really) but it is good for personal use. I know our CEO uses a dictation software in his office to type for him. But really there is no difference to banter in an office now distracting you then using a dictation software. Unless you work for a company where you are not allowed to talk.

But really to say there are other people around you is not a factor with the headsets and microphones today.