My Two Year Old Niece Won't Use A Keyboard
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I blurted out something odd to my niece the other week, she’s only two years old so doesn’t really understand what I’m saying, but she was sitting there playing with some toys and her dad's iPad (my brother). I said to her you will grow up and never use a keyboard, at the time I was just being geeky and had been reading Songs of a Distant Earth by Arthur C Clarke where a future civilisation didnt really use keyboards as the computers could understand them enough.
However, this thought has stuck with me the last two months and really stepped up a notch last two weeks. The last two weeks I have been on an amazing holiday across Thailand (and Malaysia) and have had time to ponder but also time to see a snippet of the future in action (and not just LED screens on EVERY single surface of every wall). A future where our interaction with our cloud (not devices but rather our own web) is not reactive but preemptive, not single input (the keyboard) but omni-input (every bit of data we feed into it, actively or passively).
A narrative of my preemptive cloud experience
Leading into the trip, Inbox by Gmail, automatically loaded up all of my trip into one email thread, and would highlight the next relevant items for me (such as a flight booking) as they came closer. Google calendar also went through my inbox and added things to my calendar, it did get one booking wrong (it added a booking for our friends that I had emailed to myself) luckily I double checked and removed that calendar item.
While in Thailand — every day I would load up my Google app and based on my location and some recent searches it would show me the weather for the city I was in, the time it was back home in Australia and sprinkle some local news for the country I was in (the news was not helpful but I guess it was relevant) all without being asked explicitly to do so.
I, of course, use Google Photos throughout and it knew the location/time/faces in my photos. I love this as I can search for things in the photos which came in handy when I was trying to search for specific things amongst a ridiculous amount of photos.
The day after my trip had ended, the app had automatically created an album of our visit to Thailand. I had to filter out a few photos which were repeats, or just random screenshots but this was ready to send to my family, again without me even asking for it. Check out the album here.
I cannot help but reason these things through, maybe because I understand how some of it works but I am still amazed at how passively this mostly ‘just works’. Some could also argue that this preemptive interaction is much simpler as the date range was fixed, locations were ‘foreign’ and all of my services related to this interaction being hosted by Google, however this is just the start.
What about typing?
I wrote the first rough draft of this entirely by voice dictation thanks to Apple/Siri’s dictation feature. Nearly six hundred words without actually typing a single character, it is reasonably accurate and the only pain was the iPhone requires you to start dictating again after about two minutes of speech. Google Docs also added a fully online speech recognition and document interaction features recently Info.
Personally I have grown up typing on a QWERTY keyboard and have been able to touch type for about seventeen years and can type as fast as I can talk plus feel confident getting my thoughts ‘onto digital paper’ when needed. The next generation will be different, they won’t need to interact the same way I do as it will be a completely new paradigm of interaction that will get better and better.
Regarding speech recognition — consider these two quotes from Andrew Ng
“In five years, we think 50 percent of queries will be on speech or images,” source
“Speech recognition, depending on the circumstances, is say 95 per cent accurate. So maybe it gets one word in 20 wrong. That’s really annoying if it gets one in 20 wrong and you probably don’t want to use it very often. That’s probably where speech recognition is today, … I think that as speech recognition accuracy goes from say 95 per cent to 98, 99 to 99.9, all of us in the room will go from barely using it today or infrequently to using it all the time.” Source
How it all comes together
Consider that Google’s recent I/O conference resulted in the launch of two messaging apps that use predictive AI, home interfaces that you speak without keyboard and the next generation of the full integration I talked about before through Google Assistant (Source).
Pebble Core has been launched, this is a run tracker and music player with no interface beyond speech and cloud connectivity (Source). Conversational bots are showing up in many of our messaging apps and are setting us up for a world without the UI as we know it (Source). If we want to go further we could even look at the emerging future behind Elon Musk’s comments about developing a neural lace (Source) — an interface direct to the brain, but that might be a bit too much for this article.
Just add time
All of this is not just about one single technology, maybe machine learning as the backbone technology of all of this, but the cumulative effect on how we connect with the machine. Add accurate speech analysis, geolocation, multi-device interaction, integrated services, individual understanding at a mass scale and a bit of time and you end up in a world that is very different to today.
If even only half of what we currently use searching, typing, emailing and calendars for is done automatically and the rest is reliability dictated by our voice (or thoughts) we no longer need these outdated clickable icons that link us to a mechanical past. This future will come much sooner than we might think.
When I was at university I studied e-business, it is funny to think that this was somehow separate from just plain ‘business’ as now there is only really business. The fun thing is, this difference will become the new normal.
In ten years when my niece is twelve, she will have grown up into a world where the interface is not a user interface but a new human interface where the human on the other end is really just a very good machine connected to a very big cloud.
Notes
To read more about the Pebble Core device and some future implications of machine learning to our life definitely read The Business Implications of Machine Learning by Drew Breunig.
Disclaimer: Technically my niece is currently one but having her second birthday at the end of the month :).
Second Disclaimer: I am sure others have written about this, much more eloquently and accurately — feel free to add some links to the comments.
