My experience with people trying to replace a keyboard is that they forget about my use cases and then they're surprised that their solution won't work for me. For example:
1. I'm in a team video conference and while we are discussing what needs to be done, I'm taking notes of my thoughts on what others said.
2. I'm working as a cashier and the scanner sometimes fails to recognize the barcode so I need to manually select the correct product.
Now let's look at common replacements:
A. Voice interface? Can't work. I would NOT want to shout my private notes into a team video call. The entire point of me writing them down is that they are meant for me, not for everyone.
B. Touch screen? Can't work. I can type without looking at the keyboard because I can feel the keys. Blindly typing on a touch screen, on the other hand, provides no feedback to guide me. Also, I have waited for cashiers suffering through image-heavy touch interfaces often enough to know that it's easily 100x slower than a numpad.
C. Pencil? Drawing tablet? Works badly because the computer will need to use AI to interpret what I meant. If I put in some effort to improve my handwriting, this might become workable for call notes. For the cashier, the pen sounds like one more thing that'll get lost or stuck or dirty. (Some clients are clumsy, that's why cashiers sometimes have rubber covers on the numpad.)
I believe everyone who wants to "replace" the usual computer interface should look into military aircrafts first. HOTAS. "hands on throttle-and-stick". That's what you need for people to react fast and reliably do the right thing. As many tactile buttons as you can reach without significantly moving your hands. And a keyboard already gets pretty close to that ideal...
Don't forget MFDs from military/aviation/marine interfaces. Buttons on the edges of the screen, and the interface has little boxes with a word (or abbreviation or icon) for what the button does just above each button on the screen. When the system mode changes, the boxes change their contents to match the new function of the buttons. So you get the flexible functions of a touch screen with the tactile feedback of buttons.
Some test equipment (oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers, etc.) has the same thing.
>Voice interface? Can't work. I would NOT want to shout my private notes into a team video call. The entire point of me writing them down is that they are meant for me, not for everyone.
Heh, I had a weird nightmare about that. I was typing on my laptop at a cafe, and someone came up to me and said, "Neat, you're going real old-school. I like it!" [because everyone had moved to AI voice transcription]
I was like, "But that's not a complete replacement, right? There are those times when you don't want to bother the people around you, or broadcast what you're writing."
And then there was a big reveal that AI had mastered lip-reading, so even in those cases, people would put their lips up to a camera and mouth out what they wanted to write.
There are many times I really wished to use voice interface but in private. Some notes - both personal and professional - I feel I can voice better than type them out. Sometimes I can't type - it's actually a frequent occurrence when you have small kids. For all those scenarios, I wish for some kind of microphone/device that could read from subvocalizations or lip movement.
In a similar fashion, many times I dreamed about contact lenses with screens built-in, because there are many times I'd like to pull up a screen and read or write something, but I can't, because it would be disturbing to people around me, or because the content is not for their eyes.
>For all those scenarios, I wish for some kind of microphone/device that could read from subvocalizations or lip movement.
There's a similar issue with those automated phone interfaces that "helpfully" require you to speak what you want, because you have to restart every time a pet or child screams. In those cases, it's better to have "press 1 for <whatever>", but it would also be an improvement to have it only read from your lips, so you wouldn't have to worry about background noise.
but I'm not sre that's good; moving your hands to reach more keys, without looking, brings even more keys into reach. I can hit the control keys with the palms of my hands - and often do that with the palm of the knuckle under the pinky finger - and feel where they are by the gaps around them, similar with ESC and some of the F-keys, and backspace from its shape, etc. I don't know of a keyboard which is designed to maximise that effect, or how one would be.
1. I'm in a team video conference and while we are discussing what needs to be done, I'm taking notes of my thoughts on what others said.
2. I'm working as a cashier and the scanner sometimes fails to recognize the barcode so I need to manually select the correct product.
Now let's look at common replacements:
A. Voice interface? Can't work. I would NOT want to shout my private notes into a team video call. The entire point of me writing them down is that they are meant for me, not for everyone.
B. Touch screen? Can't work. I can type without looking at the keyboard because I can feel the keys. Blindly typing on a touch screen, on the other hand, provides no feedback to guide me. Also, I have waited for cashiers suffering through image-heavy touch interfaces often enough to know that it's easily 100x slower than a numpad.
C. Pencil? Drawing tablet? Works badly because the computer will need to use AI to interpret what I meant. If I put in some effort to improve my handwriting, this might become workable for call notes. For the cashier, the pen sounds like one more thing that'll get lost or stuck or dirty. (Some clients are clumsy, that's why cashiers sometimes have rubber covers on the numpad.)
I believe everyone who wants to "replace" the usual computer interface should look into military aircrafts first. HOTAS. "hands on throttle-and-stick". That's what you need for people to react fast and reliably do the right thing. As many tactile buttons as you can reach without significantly moving your hands. And a keyboard already gets pretty close to that ideal...