Is touch-typing obsolete? Not quite, but almost.

in touch-typing •  7 years ago 

If you don't know what touch-typing is, I pity you. Mine certainly doesn't break any records, but at least I can type. Recently, I was asked the question of whether touch tying is obsolete. I'd say that as dictation gets better, touch typing is less necessary; but that doesn't mean it's gone yet. Why? Ever noticed how new technologies are often overstated, or projects like Thameslink 2000 is still not finished in 2018 (that's some pretty poor timekeeping). I think dictation will be similar, almost - but not quite - there.

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My funny story. In 1995, my employer handed me some dictation software and asked me to try it out. I was chosen because my home computer met the minimum spec for the software. So I went home and installed it but first it had to be trained.

As I spoke, I watched it parsing my words to decide what I said, sometimes taking a few runs at it -- it was that slow. I had to read all these training sentences and I noticed that breathing into the microphone made it spew characters across the screen. I said, "you shouldn't breath into the mike" as I adjusted it. Well...I was pretty surprised when it's first attempt was, "you shouldn't breed into the night" before figuring out what I really said. And they thought dictation software was going to take over back then!

Incidentally, the first dictation software test I saw was at an IEEE show in 1984.

lol