The CEO of SAP caused a stir in late January when he said, "The end of the keyboard is near.... “The future will be, for sure, that you are not typing any data information into an SAP system." He added that people will use their voices, not their fingers, to ask analytical questions of SAP systems, to trigger tasks, to make pipeline entries and more.
A recent Wall Street Journal column carried the headline, "Our Gadgets Finally Speak Human, and Tech Will Never Be the Same." The columnist, Christopher Mims, wrote: "This is shaping up to be the year that AI makes talking as powerful as tapping and swiping. The shift could be as transformative for the tech industry as the introduction of the Mac, Windows or the iPhone."
While I'm not convinced the change will be quite as total or as fast as the SAP CEO says it will be, he and Mims are describing an important new wave of convenience and productivity that AI will provide.
Let's have a look at what will — and maybe won’t — happen.
Ever since I learned to type in ninth grade, I haven't been fully convinced I could have a serious thought without my fingers on a typewriter or a keyboard. I'm sentimental enough about my father's manual typewriter that I have one displayed on my bookshelves. But, if you step back and think about it for a moment, keyboards are extremely inefficient, especially as a way to control a computer.
The core problem is that few people can type as fast as they think. But beyond that, we're always moving our cursors around to click on one thing or another. A touch screen can remove some of the inefficiency, but even then you're moving on and off the keyboard frequently.
Voice is a much faster and more natural way to do a lot of the things we now do with our fingers — and the voice capabilities of AI have improved by leaps and bounds. As a result, the capabilities are starting to be built into software that we use for all sorts of tasks.
I now dictate my text messages — saving me ever so much time by ending the trouble my fat fingers used to cause me. Voice is also showing up in word processing and email systems. Voice will allow me to tell my email that I want to reply to someone, then to dictate a quick response and be done with it. As the CEO of SAP says, data entry is also a natural for voice. No more peering over at forms, while trying to read the numbers on a sheet of paper and flipping your eyes back and forth between the paper and the screen to make sure you've typed the information correctly. You just hold the paper in front of the screen and read the data, which you can easily check with a glance.
Combining the voice capabilities with generative AI, we'll be able to just ask for data, for access to corporate systems or for any number of other things that would have taken us much longer in the past. No single action will save a ton of time, but the efficiencies will add up, and considerable drudgery will disappear. The computer mouse was an exceptionally important invention, but voice is faster and more natural.
The voice capabilities will soon be everywhere, because the arms race for AI dominance is still going full speed. In recent earnings announcements, big AI players said they were going to spend $650 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026. That's roughly the GDP of Belgium or Nigeria — and those announcements were just from four companies. Eleven Labs, a startup using AI to translate speech to text and vice versa, just raised $500 million at an $11 billion valuation, more than three times the valuation when it raised capital a year ago. Mims, the WSJ columnist, says the AI voice capabilities will increasingly find their way into convenient hardware, including Meta's glasses.
I still don't think keyboards will go away, at least not soon. I still can't really think without my fingers on the keys for something as long as what I'm writing here, and, in general, I think keyboards will be important for editing. Talking to my computer to dash off a quick, formulaic email is one thing. But editing is serious business, and it's easier just to use a mouse or a finger to get to the offending spot in the text than it would be to tell the computer to go to the second sentence of the third paragraph, to a specific word in the sentence that starts with XYZ. Even with the explosion of voice capabilities, it will take time for software developers to come up with the right mix of voice and touch commands.
I also don't think, as I've written previously, that voice will be a great way to buy things, certainly not things as important and complex as insurance. The lure of voice for purchasing was behind a lot of Amazon's early efforts with its Echo devices, but voice-based buying hasn't really happened even for paper towels and dog food. For anything more complicated, a buyer wants to see all the details so they can weigh the various variables against each other. You need a screen for that, and likely a keyboard.
The transition will be a journey and will take the form of a voice/keyboard hybrid for the foreseeable future. But I'll certainly be happy to increasingly use my voice to control my devices, saving bits of time and of frustration along the way.
Cheers,
Paul