The many faces of electronic input
A few years ago the only consistently accurate method of data input consisted of a mouse and a keyboard. The last few years have shown drastic changes in that, and the Tablet PC has been placed on the cutting edge of data input technology. In this article I’ll cover several of these input methods, their history, and where I think we are headed in the future.
Covering the most basic method first… simple keyboard input. Ever since the very first “computers”, which took up whole rooms of space, keyboard type input has been around. Modern keyboard design originated from typewriters, and were later ported over to computers when the first word processing came about. Now what about the future of keyboards? As other methods of input become more and more mainstream, I think we will start to see the keyboard fade out. They will still be around for a good many years yet, but faster input methods like speech recognition will begin to start to put away their usefulness. With slate only Tablet PCs that are out there now, we are already starting to see this happen.
Moving on, we come to handwriting recognition. Ever since the late 80s accurate handwriting recognition has been one of the most sought after technologies in the entire technology industry. Apple was the first to really take a good strike at it, with the Newton PDA technology. While ahead of its time, Newton proved that handwriting recognition could be used as a reliable input technology. There were others before the Newton, but they had even less success than the Newton did.
Other companies have since poured millions of dollars into trying to perfect this technology, with many different efforts and implementations. Now with the Tablet PC Microsoft has achieved what is acclaimed at the best handwriting recognition ever, with over 95% accuracy. I don’t think handwriting recognition will ever be “perfect”, as there are too many possibilities and user errors. I know I for one sometimes even have trouble reading my own handwriting. A more accurate expectation for the future is that handwriting recognition technology will be able to read handwriting much better than the average person.
Now we come to speech recognition, which is my favorite input method for the future. The concept of speech recognition has been around even longer than keyboard or handwriting recognition input. In the 1870’s Alexander Graham Bell had the idea and began work on a “phonoautograph”, a machine which would convert speech to written text. Bell was unsuccessful in building this machine, but it was while working on this that he got the idea for what we now know as the telephone.
So the idea has been there for a very long time, and when computers came along it was naturally one of the input methods that seemed perfect for them. After all, there are not many things we do that are more natural than speaking. Until just recently though, the processing power required for speech recognition made it unpractical. Now days though, there are quite a few options for speech recognition out there. Even the base Windows XP OS has started to integrate it. In the future I think speech will become the mainstay input method. What will this future recognition look like? I’ll point you to just about any episode of StarTrek, in which they talk to the computer almost like it is a person and it has no trouble understanding and converting to text. This is where we are headed, and I’m pretty sure it won’t take us till the 24th Century to get there. Already many people have started choosing speech over keyboard input, and this is a trend that will continue.
I hope this article has helped you to understand these methods of electronic input to a greater extent. If you are interested in more information about the history of these different methods, visit your favorite search engine (I like Google) and do a search for each one. There are many, many resources out there that make for some interesting reading for those interested.
Article contributed by Spencer Goad (spg@tabletpcbuzz.com), Owner and Editor of TabletPCBuzz.com. TabletPCBuzz was built to support the Tablet PC community via news reporting, reviews, articles, and community forums. Today it is one of the largest Tablet PC sites on the web. Check it out today at - http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com.
