Talk to the computer, Read the phone?

I'm at the annual Andicom conference in gorgeous Cartagena Colombia, the big telecoms event for the Andies region of Latin America. I'll be doing my 7th Mass Media bit (no surprise). But today I was talking with a group of colleague and someone mentioned a quote from Bill Gates. I don't have the exact quotation, and on a quick Google search, was not able to find it yet - I'm sure I'll find it soon or if someone from our readers knows it, please post a comment for us.

The quotation was roughly that in the future "we will talk to the computer, and read the mobile phone" (where currently we read text on the PC screen and we talk on the mobile phone). Please note that is not the verbatim quotation, so please don't spread that quotation for now. I will try to get the correct wording of it, and will blog with that when I have it. But yes, as a thought, this is indeed an interesting thought and one we can easily agree with and have many early bits of evidence that this is going to be the case.

So yes, you are reading my blog right now. You are literally reading from the PC screen via the internet. That seems to the "the right way of things" and very natural to us. If you talk on a device, you talk on a phone, which obviously now for most people on the planet, is no longer a landline phone, it is a mobile phone (ie cellphone). We read computers and we talk to phones.

Fine. But what is this talking to the computer? Well, it starts with Skype. Already over 130 million people talk on a PC (and internet) based service. What may have seemed an odd idea a decade ago - that "normal" people would use a PC to do voice communications, is now reality for over 10% of all internet users - and for one in seven owners of a personal computer. One element of Bill Gates's quotation is starting to happen.

Of course the main thesis of the idea is that the clumsy user-interface of the personal computer - the keyboard and mouse - is going to shift to voice recognition. There are ever better voice recognition applications that already exist to do anything from basic PC operation by voice, to rather well functioning real time dictation ie speaking directly to create a letter or other text document or file. Yes, that part of the migration is a near term future and many companies are working hard to turn that into a reality.

There is more to this, of course. We also go from "reading" the PC (or internet) to "watching it" and to listening to it. From early applications and services that were very strongly text-based, we now have pictures, videoclips, music files, and all kinds of streaming services and even IPTV and the ever more advanced multiplayer online virtual environments. The PC is evolving far beyond text as either an input or output standard format.

Meanwhile what of the phone? Specifically the mobile phone (cellphone), obviously. We are well on the way to shift our phone behaviour away from voice calls to more advanced visual services, starting with basic SMS text messages. Already today, three out of every four mobile phone owners worldwide is an active user of SMS text messages - that means more than twice as many people send SMS text messages than the total user base of the internet. These active users of SMS average sending out over 3 SMS text messages per day (the leading country Philippines, averages 20 sent per day). In all countries we see the same trend that people now actually prefer using SMS texting to making voice calls on their mobile phones. We've reported here on our blogsite about this in the UK and Ireland already years ago (as in Scandinavia and the Philippines for example) but more recently the same trend has been reported in New Zealand, in China etc.

What do we read? Its no longer just SMS from friends. We've reported of all kinds of innovations in this space, from reminders and alerts, to actually reading full books, released as mobile books. Remember, five out of the ten best-selling printed books in Japan last year, started out as mobile phone books (even written on mobile phones by young new authors).

From SMS texting it is then a much smaller step into other text and messaging based services, from sending and receiving picture messages on the MMS service, to Twitter and all kinds of mobile blogging solutions; and from there, a small step to video sharing such as using Qik, or doing your online dating and flirting on a service like Flirtomatic, etc. So the phone was once a device we talked into (and listented to) and it is now moving beyond voice calls.

As this shift happens, the advertisers are rushing in as well. More people receive advertising on a mobile phone than on the internet - or indeed on a TV set (Juniper says 1.5 billion people this year will receive an advertisement on their mobile phone, contrast that with 1.3 billion internet users, and 1.5 billion TV sets in use in the world this year).

Interesting thought, gives another angle to thinking about how our lives are changing. Meanwhile I'll pay attention to all the presentations here about the scene in Latin America and blog about that later in the week. Meanwhile, if any of our readers knows the Bill Gates quotation, please post it for us in the comments or send me an email to  tomi (at) tomiahonen (dot) com  so I can also include the real quotation properly attributed and hopefully even in context..

Comments

[Russell Buckley]

Hi Tomi

Nice post.

Lots of things get attributed to Mr Gates erroneously. But I suspect that this is referring to Bill's love affair with speech recognition as an input mechanism on PC's.

He's been predicting that it's going to take over from a mouse and keyboard within 5 years (and sometimes 10 years - sometimes within days of each other!).

Bill Gates, 14 September 2005: “We totally believe speech recognition will go mainstream somewhere over the next decade.”

Bill Gates, 1 October 1997: “In this 10-year time frame, I believe that we’ll not only be using the keyboard and the mouse to interact, but during that time we will have perfected speech recognition and speech output well enough that those will become a standard part of the interface.”

Bill Gates, 6 October 1997: “The PC five years from now — you won’t recognize it, because speech will have come into the interface, the screen will be a flat screen, the performance will be 20 times what it is today.”

If you want more, Matthew Thomas has a bunch more here http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2005/12/30/gates

Nothing about mobiles though. However, it doesn't seem very logical to believe that we'll be talking to one digital device and interacting with another in a different way.

Obviously, if the man didn't say it, it doesn't mean that your post isn't valid!

Interesting fact though. I've just Googled some of the words in your post and the number one result is.....this post. Shows the power of blogs!

Interesting fact #2. For all his greatness, predicting hasn't necessarily been one of Bill's greatest strengths. Remember how he missed the internet and promoted the Tablet? Although he denies ever saying the famous '640K is more memory than anyone will ever need.'

Russell

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