Comments on: “Keyboard? How Quaint!”…well, maybe not?

By: Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:25:54 +0000

Sally: I think that we may need to think a bit like the computer.

We’ve been down that road with handwriting recognition. The earliest consumer-level handwriting recognition devices tried to recognise human handwriting and mostly failed. Handwriting recognition didn’t take off in consumer devices until Palm introduced Graffiti, in which the humans had to learn how “think a bit like the computer” and write in a prescribed manner.

However, where is handwriting recognition now? It’s been 9 Moore-doublings since Graffiti was introduced. Yet a 512-increase in processing power has not resulted in a corresponding increase in acceptance of handwriting recognition. I’d go as far as to say that handwriting recognition, Graffiti and all, has been rejected by the market.

I suspect there are parallels to the voice recognition issue as well.

By: Berwyn

Berwyn — Tue, 04 May 2010 03:04:13 +0000

Because typing is difficult for me, I tried VR for a bit. Was mused that it couldn’t understand simple words like ‘blue’ (glue? flew?), but had no problem at all with ‘Jararvellir’.

By: Charissa

Charissa — Tue, 04 May 2010 01:39:46 +0000

Personally, I think the biggest barrier to computers & speech relates more to culture than anything else. Maybe that’s just context as you noted above, but a word is not just a word. Words grew out of the culture they were created in (or vice versa I’m not an anthropologist, so maybe this is a chicken-and-egg problem or maybe people more knowledgeable than myself know this already) and to take them out of that culture creates issues. Computers don’t really get those subtle elements, and computers today need to be more “multicultural” than they’re capable of being, and so, until you can program cultural subtleties into a computer, voice recognition is never going to be as great as it seems like it should be.

By: Sally

Sally — Mon, 03 May 2010 23:42:22 +0000

I think that we may need to think a bit like the computer, in order for it to do what we want; or phrase things with the computer in mind. Just in dealing with data bases, I find myself needing to anticipate what form a particular Chief Complaint or Medication needs to be asked for. I know this has to do with who programs it, but that’s true in any case.

Perhaps the verbal recognition dictation is a start for dealing with the wording piece. They have accent packages for that. There is a particular cardiologist, who I never thought would be able to dictate to a computer, and yet he is.