Gates Sees Diminished Role for Keyboards

Fri Feb 22, 2008 10:28 AM EST
advertisement

PITTSBURGH — People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.

"It's one of the big bets we're making," he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company's daily operations in July.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.

Gates also said the software that is proliferating in various branches of science, including biology and astronomy must become even more advanced.

"They're dealing with so much information that ... the need for machine learning to figure out what's going on with that data is absolutely essential," he said.

Microsoft is trying to establish ties not only with university computer science departments but also with reseachers in other scientific areas "to help us understand where new inventions are necessary," Gates said.

Gates plans to retire as Microsoft's chief software architect in July and focus on philanthropy.

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
  • 6 Votes
  • Enjoy this article? Help vote it up the 'Vine.

Back To Top

Published to:

What's this?
Who's leading the conversation?
This visualization below allows you to see the impact that each user has on the current conversation. The top row contains the group of users who have had the most impact, the 2nd row the group of users who have had the 2nd most impact (et cetera). Users with similar impact are grouped together, and the average score of the group is shown to the left of the group. The author of the article is also shown on the left, in their corresponding group. Each user's score is based on the number of comments the user has made plus the number of votes their comments have received. The scores are calculated relative one another, so while their absolute value is not particularly important, their relative difference does indicate a larger difference in impact on the conversation.
0.5
{"commentId":1496867,"authorDomain":"sheil"}
Sheil Naik

It's already happened with Point of Sale devices and we see more and more touch screens everyday in our daily lives from malls to iPhones. It's a difficult idea to implement and it really does involve some creative "outside of the box" thinking, but I could see it happen in the far future.

{"commentId":1496867,"threadId":"223483","contentId":"1318155","authorDomain":"sheil"}
    Reply#1 - Fri Feb 22, 2008 11:54 AM EST
    {"commentId":1501428,"authorDomain":"kirklennon"}
    Kirk Lennon
    In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard

    I'm glad to see Microsoft is planning for a fictional future. Is he serious? The number of searches done through speech today is ... negligible.

    Even if we optimistically assume that speech-to-text software magically starts working* within the next five years, that doesn't mean it's an efficient or practical input method. I've got iTunes playing music all the time; I don't want to talk over it. In fact, I'm not really interested in talking to any computer, ever. I don't think I'm alone on that, either. This vision of talking to computers strikes me as some sort of outdated idea from the 1970s, when computers were novelties. People know how to Google now; it's not that hard.

    *By "working," I mean, "working reliably." And by "reliably," I mean at least 99.9% accuracy, at a minimum. Correcting errors using speech is much, much harder than hitting backspace. Anything worse than that is just more trouble than it's worth, especially when the benefits are already so tenuous.

    {"commentId":1501428,"threadId":"223483","contentId":"1318155","authorDomain":"kirklennon"}
      Reply#2 - Sat Feb 23, 2008 8:26 PM EST
      {"canLink":false,"threadId":"223483","isPrivate":false}
      Leave a Comment:
      You're in Easy Mode. If you prefer, you can use XHTML Mode instead.
      Newsvine Privacy Statement
      As a new user, you may notice a few temporary content restrictions. Click here for more info.
      {"threadId":"223483","contentId":"1318155"}
      Start TrackingStart Tracking
      Stop TrackingStop Tracking
      Back To Top | Front Page