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Why are we still typing?

If you are a scifi fan you will be very much aware that the future is filled with computers that interact with humans through spoken words.

Whether it's Blake's 7 and Orac or the original Star Trek, the concept of computers that understand the spoken word and respond with a human-like voice has been around for decades.

Today, in 2025, we have this exact technology at our fingertips -- so why aren't we using it more?

I've seen video of people interacting with ChatGPT using nothing more than the spoken word but the reality is that this is the exception rather than the rule.

Once my wife figured out that she could talk to the GoogleTV remote rather than mess around with four cursor keys and laboriously type out a search query onscreen, she quickly adapted to this newfound convenience. However, she doesn't do that with her smartphone... prefering instead to tap away at the tiny virtual keyboard it offers.

In fact, once the novelty of Siri's voice-interactive capabilities wore off, I stopped seeing people talking to their phones like they used to. Everyone just thumbs-out messages and queries instead.

Why is this?

Surely, now that the long-promised scifi future is here, we should be using it -- right?

Could it be that typing is just faster, less error-prone and offers the bonus of privacy?

I don't know for sure but it has to be one or more of those reasons that see people ignoring the future and still typing and reading rather than just engaging in a verbal conversation with their devices.

My typing speed on a proper keyboard is about 120 words per minute -- unless I'm having a bad day with Parkinson's, in which case it can be a quarter of that due to the errors that tremors can produce. I doubt I can speak much faster than I type on a good day and whilst finger-errors can be fixed up "on the fly", correcting mistakes in a speech to text conversion is slower and far less convenient -- so I type.

Perhaps one day, once my tremors get so bad that the frustration of trying to type overwhelms me, I'll start using the speech to text technology that is now available but, until then, it's all fingers baby!

In fact, if I was forced to use a smartphone virtual keyboard then I'd also probably be leaning far more on issuing my commands and queries with voice. I hate those tiny virtual keys and the fact that I have to think about every character I enter when using such a device. The beauty of a full sized keyboard is that my brain is wired to just "think" the words onto the screen and my fingers automatically know which keys to press.

In fact the magic of touch-typing is something that always fascinated me. When I was a "hunt and peck" typist, I couldn't even imagine how wonderful it would be to have my brain wired in the way it now is -- so that thoughts become words on the screen. Even though I am now a very competent touch-typist it still amazes me the way this works and the power of the brain to automate certain processes so that they do not require conscious thought to work.

I wonder if the *real* future of human/computer interaction is not something far beyond the spoken word.

Perhaps Elon Musk is onto something with his Neuralink tech and, within a few decades, we'll all be given implants at birth that allow us to connect to computing devices in ways that are, at this point in time, still the realm of science fiction.

Perhaps the future is not AI but IA -- Intelligence Augmentation, by way of a wireless neural implant that means we only have to think to control or query a super-smart computing device.

Such tech also takes us into the realm of telepathy -- the ability to communicate with each other simply by thinking.

Oh dear... I just had a dystopian vision of the future flash before my eyes...

Imagine row upon row of people, all sitting quietly, plumbed into tubes that provide nutrients and carry away waste -- all the while watching tiktok videos that are beamed directly into their cerebal cortex and that are controlled by swipey-thoughts.

Ready to join The Matrix anyone?

Carpe Diem folks!

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