Soon we’ll be able to forget fiddly mobile controls and tiny keyboards and control our phones by voice commands. Hurray and we all live happily ever after!
At least that’s the premise at the start of an article at Technology Review. But then as you read on, it’s full of caveats like “someday soon you may also find yourself dictating a text message into your phone” and “eventually mean the end of pecking at keyboards.”
And you realise we heard the same thing in the early 90′s about speech recognition with PC’s. I might be wrong, but it’s still only a tiny market.
I suspect that the same might be the case here. I think better mobile keyboards might be the answer in the shorter term like this.
Checking out Tom Hume’s blog I see he’s making much the same point, but from a slightly more informed technical stand point 
Tom also asks “What would the ability to easily enter larger volumes of text add to our experience of using mobiles?…”
Well, if the market goes the way I think it will, this is actually very important. If we can find a way of inputting large amounts of our own data (call it “typing” for convenience) the mobile will be transformed into a kind of micro PC. It’ll do all the mobile stuff. And if you dock it into a keyboard/monitor combo you’ll be able to blog, create word processing, spreadsheets and presentations on it.
Most of this can be stored off-device and accessed anywhere. The real work will be done by huge central servers. Think BlogLines, Google and Flickr.
That’s the future I think.
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