05/23/2017

Your Camera Wants to Kill Your Keyboard

How will the move to all-things image-based impact organizations in the future?

Snapchat knew it from the start, but in recent months Google and Facebook have all but confirmed it: The keyboard, slowly but surely, is fading into obscurity.

Last week at Google’s annual developer conference, the company presented its vision for how it expects its users—more than a billion people—to interact with technology in the coming years. And for the most part, it didn’t involve typing into a search box. Instead, Google’s brass spent its time onstage touting the company’s speech recognition skills and showing off Google Lens, a new computer vision technology that essentially turns your phone’s camera into a search engine.

Technology has once again reached an inflection point. For years, smartphones relied on hardware keyboards, a holdover from the early days of cell phones. Then came multitouch. Spurred by the wonders of the first smartphone screens, people swiped, typed, and pinched. Now, the way we engage with our phones is changing once again thanks to AI. Snapping a photo works as well, if not better, than writing a descriptive sentence in a search box. Casually chatting with Google Assistant, the company’s omnipresent virtual helper, gets results as fast, if not faster, than opening Chrome and navigating from there. The upshot, as Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained, is that we’re increasingly interacting with our computers in more natural and emotive ways, which could mean using your keyboard a lot less.

Please click here to read the complete article from Wired.