What is on Your Mind?

I think with the increasing use of things like siri and dragonspeak that have not only the ability to convert what you say into text but also act on it, we are entering an age of computing when the average user will just tell their computer what they want to do and the computer will do it for them. This is a good thing for streamlining and making computers accessible to everyone. However I do think that this will mean less of "us" in favor of GUI users, and will also make our jobs more important.
If anyone has any thoughts on this or the whole "talking to your computer" thing that would be awesome.

I don't understand who are "we" and why this software should make our jobs more "important"?
If something like this would be accepted by a broad mass of people, then it would be just different or more jobs for developers, until maybe this hype is gone.
For work as an administrator or developer I think it is a very useless feature. Can you imagine sitting with co-workers next to you and babbling into a mike, instucting your shell? I can't at all. If you can't concentrate and talk wrong things, that would be more fatal than typing them. When you type them you can see them and read them again. I am not sure if everybody can always recall what he said, especially in a complex command line.
It might be good for "turn washy machine on" or "show photo - next - next...". For complex and critical things it is dangerous.
Maybe if they make implants one day that brings your thoughts to command line (while filtering every other thought ), that might work. But I guess such an implant would be more expensive in it's invention than having the people just type the stuff in.
I like more to talk to people than to computer but the occasional curse where I don't really expect an answer of this machine.
Such a feature might be ok in terms of accessability for handicapped people or if you are driving a car and should have your eyes on the street and the hands at the wheel. Or just for terms of lazyness, but only for simple commands, nothing complex.

All I can say, Evolving and moving forward are the norms in computing

I have just watched users get farther and farther from what the computer is actually doing. Layer after layer is being applied to the GUI each one more user friendly but also less capable of knowing what is wrong with it when something does go wrong.
I guess I should have said I was in IT support...
I have just noticed a trend of an unfortunate number of people who are "good with computers" but not familiar with anything going on behind the mouse and desktop. (To be certain that kind of person fills a niche in the technology field, but when the computer crashes and you have to boot to a command line they get lost.

I still think a mouse movement or swipe on the screen is faster than many commands can be spoken and/or interpreted. As zaxxon said, you dont want this functionality anyway in mission-critical environments: if someone is slamming a door in the background, the results may be unpredictable. Also, I dont see this functionality become ubiquitous in office environments either, where there is already much noise from telephone conversations and printers and the occasional outside noise. So we are still quite a way off from seeing that becoming a reality.

Watching someone hammer away -- for months -- at a monstrous java program that could be accomplished with a 1-line shell script, having used 9 terminals so far this morning in solving a work issue after being soundly told GUIs makes terminals wholly useless, I'm pretty convinced 'new' isn't always 'better'.

The bottom line is, the computer's not psychic. It can only respond in a human manner in a small preprogrammed domain. We'll still end up learning how to talk to the computer instead of vice-versa.

---------- Post updated at 11:57 AM ---------- Previous update was at 11:50 AM ----------

All too true. It gets embarrassing to be hailed as a technical genius for exercising one's ability to read, and follow instructions

I had a customer bring in their computer after it 'crashed and went black and refused to do anything'. Boot it up and what's happened?

'CMOS time and date not set. Press F1 to continue' White text on a black screen instead of vice versa was so intimidating to them that they never read it.


Another one acted so astonished when their hard drive failed out of the blue. It'd been warning them every boot for weeks, a 'hard drive 0 fail' on the POST screen requiring them to hit F1 to boot. White text on a black screen instead of vice versa was so intimidating that they just mashed keys until they figured out F1 makes it boot.

In fact, I think I would probably be saying things like: control-a-control-cee-alt-tab-control-vee-control-es-control-doubleyou etc etc etc a lot of the time.