On Thursday, 27 November 2014 at 19:58:33 UTC, Joakim wrote:
You would have to be a very slow talker if you could type
faster.
I don't think it would be a one-to-one correspondence. I saw a
youtube where a guy had rigged a voice interface for code and he
didn't say things like "foo left paren bar comma baz right paren
semicolon" it was more like "foo bah bar *click*" - he made a new
language with various sounds.
On the other hand, by the same reasoning, talking faster than
typing doesn't necessarily match up because like how would you
say "a = *b | c"? I would probably say something like "a equals
what's pointed to by by bitor c"... and I type it at about the
same speed as I say it since there's more syllables than symbols.
Autocomplete and such can give an edge to the typing too.
I don't think talk-coding would be slow - in my head, sometimes I
say these things as my fingers translate it to code - but I don't
think it would be much faster either.
Now, talking vs typing prose is a different story, my fingers
couldn't keep up with my brain on writing this email. But with
code, my fingers typically aren't the bottleneck.
(and it certainly wouldn't revolutionize the industry, where the
slowest part for me tends to be figuring out WTF the customer is
asking for anyway...)
Windows Start menu to launch applications and get into the
right system settings, ie by using the keyboard.
A friend asked me over the weekend how to get to the calculator
on Windows 8. One person was giving the old Win 95 answer "click
start, go to programs, accessories, then click calculator". That
doesn't work on Win8... and I think the new way is so much better:
I said "hit that windows button on the keyboard then type
"calculator" and hit enter".
She did that and agreed it is super easy.
I think the biggest benefit of a GUI isn't so much ease of use as
the ability to browse the options. If she didn't know there was a
calculator, she would never have thought to just type the word,
but might have noticed the icon while looking at the start menu.
But if you already know what you want, it is hard to beat just
asking for it directly.
We still have some way to go to get the computer to accurately
translate all normally spoken speech to text, gotta get that
done first.
Right.
