Is this the End of Typing? The Internet's Next Billion Users Want Video and Voice (foxnews.com) 230
An anonymous reader shares a WSJ article: The internet's global expansion is entering a new phase, and it looks decidedly unlike the last one. Instead of typing searches and emails, a wave of newcomers -- "the next billion," the tech industry calls them -- is avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images. They are a swath of the world's less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy. Incumbent tech companies are finding they must rethink their products for these newcomers and face local competitors that have been quicker to figure them out. "We are seeing a new kind of internet user," said Ceasar Sengupta, who heads a group at Alphabet's Google trying to adapt to the new wave. "The new users are very different from the first billion." A look at Megh Singh's smartphone suggests how the next billion might determine a new set of winners and losers in tech. Mr. Singh, 36, balances suitcases on his head in New Delhi, earning less than $8 a day as a porter in one of India's biggest railway stations. He isn't comfortable reading or using a keyboard. That doesn't stop him from checking train schedules, messaging family and downloading movies. "We don't know anything about emails or even how to send one," said Mr. Singh, who went online only in the past year. "But we are enjoying the internet to the fullest." Mr. Singh squatted under the station stairwell, whispering into his phone using speech recognition on the station's free Wi-Fi. It is a simple affair, a Sony Corp. model with 4GB of storage, versus the 32GB that is typically considered minimal in the developed world. On his screen are some of the world's most popular apps -- Google's search, Facebook's WhatsApp -- but also many that are unfamiliar in the developed world, including UC Browser, MX Player and SHAREit, that have been tailored for slow connections and skimpy data storage.
No, they don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Watching video sucks when I want the news quickly.
Re:No, they don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Watching video sucks when I want the news quickly.
Indeed. I always skip articles that have videos embedded. I can read a lot quicker than a video plays.
Re:No, they don't. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Nothing is more fucking annoying than clicking a link toa news story and seeing just the headline and a fucking video.
Re:No, they don't. (Score:5, Informative)
Well more then news. What really gets me pissed is searching for information on how to do something, other then getting a good document where I can skip a lot of the intro stuff which I already know, and get to the segment I need some detail in. I have to watch the video showing how to open a file, scroll down....
Re:No, they don't. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It isn't like written language was entirely a good thing.
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If I want to know how to do something I go to youtube.
If I want to know how to do something, I look really hard for a web page with written instructions. The last thing I want is to have to listen to somebody's idiot background music while they fumble around 'doing' something that could be described in a few bullet points.
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Written language evolved from drawing pictograms on cave walls to remember hunting strategies [ted.com], to writing on clay tablets [wikipedia.org] to keep track of money, legal agreements, then finding that writing on paper is far easier and allowed knowledge to be shared in the most compact physical means possible. [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps a USB stick full of PDF documents is now more compact than a box of books. Then Youtube and other online videos replace the need for the USB stick.
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Well, as long as all the infrastructure and equipment needed to access the knowledge is still around, working, connected, and format-compatible...
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Those 'impressive' Greeks would fall off their pedestals if they had half an inkling of the amount of knowledge the average broadly read and well-informed IT geek of today carries around as a matter of course.
The Library of Alexandria had somewhere between 40,000 and 400,000 scrolls.
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Usually, I read the news, and listen to other things. It does me no good when news agencies assume that a video--perhaps even an autoplaying video-- can replace text.
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Text to speech means automatic closed captioning. A.I. and deep learning means evaluation of content to create text-based summaries and categorization topics.
Automatic captions are full of mondegreens (Score:2)
Good luck finding a video on YouTube of any complexity whose automatic captions are correct. And good luck finding a site that lets you view the automatic captions alone instead of viewing the video.
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Oh I remember turning down a job from Jawed Karim [wikipedia.org] for his startup several years ago (maybe around 2005). I told him, video is inefficient, it would take way too much bandwidth to stream videos and few people would be interested in making them.
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Sounds made up (Score:5, Interesting)
I've never met anyone in any age group who wants voice or video for most of their consumption. There are exceptions: how-to videos are usually more helpful than how-to directions, and voice is nice when you want to hear how something is pronounced. But you would have to be brain dead to want to favor those, as they cannot be searched, can't be digested at work and you can't skip around in them to find the little bit you need without having to take in the large amounts of bullshit, fluff, marketing and distraction.
This sounds like astroturfing, burn everyone associated with it.
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I prefer how to Directions. How to videos can be a supplement. But normally when I look up on how to do something, I am already 90% there, and I am just running into a small roadblock.
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Well, the premise is people that cannot read or write making up the next billion.
For me, I HATE video or audio presentation of information; it is too information-sparse and modal. Strong visual presentations can be quite effective, and I do understand that verbalization of information can be helpful to many people, but if this is the direction we are going I will quite happily disconnect from the internet.
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Well, the premise is people that cannot read or write making up the next billion.
Then they should watch the "How To Read" and "How To Write" videos.
damn right cultural imperialism (Score:2)
"How to read the fucking manual"
"How to ask a question [catb.org]"
and "how to spot bullshit"
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The thirteen year olds in marketing departments who run the world have decided that the only way to shift more product is to do away with text on the web. This will lead to the entire world repurchasing all of their computing devices and the depreciation of all the old shit like newspapers and textbooks. However this is a bigger ask than replacing drop-down menus with ribbon bars and I predict said thirteen year olds are about to be encouraged to shuffle off this mortal coil by "the resistance".
On the other
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I don't see how it's pompous to point out that rural farmers in less-developed countries are much less likely to be functionally literate than rural farmers in the U.S. state of Arkansas. I'm under the impression that the urban/rural divide in literacy is more pronounced in less-developed countries than in industralized countries such as the UnitedStates.
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How many people have you met that are illiterate?
How many people in the world are illiterate?
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To whom are the poor being sold? (Score:2)
If a group that has no money is the product, to whom is the group being sold? It can't be to advertisers, as a group that has no money cannot afford the luxury items that the advertisers are promoting.
Re:Sounds made up (Score:5, Insightful)
It can be informative, but it can also be damn annoying.
A lot of these you-tubers make videos as if they're getting paid by the minute instead of by the views. The "how to such-and-such" video goes something like "Hi, I'm so-and-so, and welcome to my youtube channel where I talk about how to upgrade your computer and other electronic devices." [insert long pauses between some words] "Today I'm going to show you how to do such-and-such; such-and-such is useful if you want to [insert long list of things with long pauses in between them while the speaker thinks about it]."
5 minutes in, and maybe you're finally getting to the useful part. Hey, newsflash, I wouldn't have looked up your video if I didn't already know what I was looking for and why I was looking for it!
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Yeah, I'm going to subscribe to the guy telling me where my cars radiator pepcock is located using a video... because all his other videos are going to be useful to me..... sigh
not happening (Score:2, Informative)
Doesn't work in an office environment. Too much noise.
Voice has a time and place. (Score:2)
Voice is great on something like a Google Home or Alexa where you want an answer but not sitting in front of a keyboard.
Although then, voice recognition technology still sucks eggs. Normally takes about 4 or 5 tries to get Alexa to understand what you ask her. I'm sure with time voice recognition will eventually be acceptable, but it's still in it's infancy.
If you have a keyboard infront of you, I can't imagine anyone not preferring to use that, it's much more accurate... more private... and quieter. Can
Re:Voice has a time and place. (Score:5, Insightful)
Talking to a computer may be a good way to enter the chemical structure of transparent aluminum, though.
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Talking to a computer may be a good way to enter the chemical structure of transparent aluminum, though.
It always amused me that Scotty, who had apparently never touched a keyboard and mouse (let alone would have had no familiarity with the software used in the 1980s) was able to pick up that keyboard after learning voice wouldn't work, and smash away and within 5 seconds he had come up with the blue-print for transparent aluminum despite not having any knowledge of touch-typing or the software being used.
It's like when hackers on TV shows come across a network they've never seen before... smash a few keys an
Re:Voice has a time and place. (Score:4, Funny)
It always amused me that Scotty, who had apparently never touched a keyboard and mouse (let alone would have had no familiarity with the software used in the 1980s) was able to pick up that keyboard after learning voice wouldn't work, and smash away and within 5 seconds he had come up with the blue-print for transparent aluminum despite not having any knowledge of touch-typing or the software being used.
I haven't seen that in a while. But I thought he started out doing the two finger hunt an peck thing and progressed quickly. I took it as showing that Scotty was extremely adept at picking things up. Plus it's a movie, would you have stayed in the theater if it spent 45 minutes of him poking at a keyboard?
It's like when hackers on TV shows come across a network they've never seen before... smash a few keys and they're instantly connected to everything on the network and instantly know how to operate it all.
Don't forget the spinning graphics with no command line at all.
The problem with voice recognition... (Score:3)
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Teaching people to use computers is still a more achievable task than teaching computers to understand people
The difference though: Once someone figures out computers accurately understanding natural language; then it's a technology that will be everywhere in a couple of years. Like strong AI it only needs to be invented once; versus having to continually train new users in the arcane.
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I'm sure with time voice recognition will eventually be acceptable, but it's still in it's infancy.
Like the rest of AI disciplines, it has been in its infancy for over 50 years now. Some infancy.
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I keep one under the desk, incase workplace violence breaks out.
-Rick
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why do submissions like this get approved? Typing isn't going away because some poor guy in India is whispering to a cheap phone.
Tell that to the generation too lazy to type, or even learn how to.
There's a reason all of these "personal assistant" devices in the home are voice powered.
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Tell that to the generation too lazy to type, or even learn how to.
That "too lazy to type" generation is the texting, tweeting, facebook update generation. They type more in highschool than most of us in older generations did in college.
The market calls bullshit on your claim. There are no keyboards attached to all of these personal assistants regardless of what you want to believe.
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Is there a concise term for "people too lazy to type more than one paragraph in a sitting"?
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Twitter users.
Fake news (Score:2)
Seriously, this is just some push by marketroids who sold a bill of goods to media execs. They think it will let them fire journalists and print hosts and replace them with cheaper H2-B and H1-B workers and recent AV grads.
But we don't want video everywhere.
I hate stupid articles that start playing videos. I hate news showing as video when I'd rather read it and skim it.
Ad funny cartoons. We like that.
But this is so fake, and just an attempt to cut costs by firing existing print journalists and replacing th
No, not the end. Next question. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No, not the end. Next question. (Score:5, Insightful)
shhh! This may be our justification for going back to offices with doors!
Compare to a call center (Score:2)
An office full of people using speech recognition won't get anything done.
There's a term for an office full of people who speak into a microphone for a living: a call center. They use the speech recognition means in the brain of each customer who calls.
Also discriminatory for non-native English (Score:5, Insightful)
I should also point out, as someone with five languages, that you can usually work fairly well in written versions of a language you didn't grow up with, but that having to listen to audio of a language, with accents, that is not your own, is far more difficult.
A lot of people who prefer text are not native speakers of the text. They can either google translate it, or understand 95 percent of it, if it's text, but with audio and video they tend to have to listen to it 2-3 times before they understand. Have you ever watched Mandarin or Russian broadcasts where the speaker is talking quickly?
Great gloomy future science fiction premise (Score:2)
A teeming underclass only capable of reading and "writing" an ideogrammatic language whose verbalization is developed by an AI.
Science Fiction Interfaces suck. (Score:4, Insightful)
In Science fiction, we have voice control and these 3d holographic displays... It makes the future seem all cool and such however in real life it would just suck.
Voice control is mostly used as a way to push the narrative so the actor can act and we get an immediate response back.
"Computer give me all references of Darmok"
"Computer give me all references of Tenargra"
vs Select count(*) cnt, Location from UltraBigDB where data like '%Darmok%' or data like '%Tenargra%'
group by Location
having count(*) > 1
order by 1 desc
In these rooms there is so much cross chatter work would be a noisy place.
Then you have those 3d holographic displays. Looks cool on TV, and that way we can see the data, with the actors face, however having text on your normal background, will be real annoying with all the moving stuff.
2
While video has its place, so does normal text that we can read and write too.
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Temba, his arms wide.
Re:I don't even see the code ... (Score:2)
I was always a fan of the quick hard type instructions then stamp the enter key, no matter what the procedure call is still hard type instruction than stamp the enter key.
Obligitory:
Cypher: Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. But there’s way too much information to decode the Matrix. You get used to it. II don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, red-head.
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"Computer give me all references of Darmok"
"Computer give me all references of Tenargra"
"Alexa, open nearby planets' history and find 'Darmok' or 'Tanagra', preferably together." The computer might translate this into a full-text search query represented as follows, with Boost commands tweaking relevance ordering:
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Video and voice suck, text and images are fine (Score:5, Interesting)
For these reasons audio and video are fine for entertainment, but they are vastly inferior to text and images as methods of information conveyance. The only times they become really useful for learning is when used as a third bandwidth channel to augment text and images. e.g. Professor writing text and drawing images on the chalkboard, while explaining things orally. Or when your vision is otherwise occupied. e.g. Listening to podcasts while driving.
Americans already there (Score:3)
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Fuck UC Browser (Score:2)
Oh god, fuck UC Browser. I've had to put it on a blacklist in my JavaScript online bug reporter, because it cannot handle even the most basic of tasks without throwing a shitfit and generating countless error logs sent back to the servers. Searching around online to even find out what the browser was, and all I got was other devs complaining about the same issue before even discovering WHAT the thing even was!
8$ a day! for a porter? (Score:2)
My first job out of college with a brand spanking new BTech degree was in the Ministry of Defense as a Scientist B. At that time it was a "gazzetted officer" position, meaning my appointment will be published in the official government Gazette as an officer. I had the right to sign my name using green ink and "attest" the authenticity of documents
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Hw long ago are you talking about, and have you accounted for inflation? It may not be as much of an improvement in real spending power as you think...
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It was back in 1984. Ask this question, are the minimum wage workers in America earning the same number of dollars a rookie lieutenant was earning? There is a PDF of USArmy pay scales of 1984 https://www.dfas.mil/dam/jcr:1... [dfas.mil]
Assuming O for Officers and W for Warrant Officers and E for Enlisted men, The lowest basic pay seems to be 1150$ a month. 302$ a month for quart
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That seems like a reasonable estimation to me, thanks for putting it into perspective.
Nope. (Score:2)
No you aren't using the internet to it's fullest if you're limiting yourself to just what you can get to on a smartphone with voice to text.
There is a lot you can do on a smart phone but there is even more you can't.
It's like someone on dialup today saying "we are enjoying the internet to the fullest." Sure you can still communicate with it but you're pretending a lot of things just don't exist.
No Idiot Left Behind (Score:2)
"They are a swath of the world's less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy..."
In a strange twist of irony, the 21st century will bring forth the world's most advanced technology, and will ensure that it is so idiot-proof, a fucking caveman could operate it.
Welcome to the future. Intelligence and skill, is optional.
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Hmmm... (Score:2)
"cheap data plans"
So not Americans.....
screw those guys (Score:2)
the last thing I need is every mutterance in my cubicle being recorded
It just seems like it some days. (Score:2)
Sigh (Score:2, Informative)
As a quickreader of some sorts, (550 words a minute) I'd absolutely hate it when that billion illiterates will format the content with stupid videos, where self-important people need 15 minutes to come to the fucking point.
obligatory xkcd (Score:4, Informative)
Game Videos (Score:5, Funny)
"Hmm, I am having problems with this puzzle, I will check youtube for a playthrough on how to solve it."
*finds playthrough, clicks on video*
"WHATS UP GUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYS!!!!"
*close tab*
The great thing about text (Score:2)
is that it makes machine translation a hell a lot more reliable.
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But text is practical in fewer situations. And if you do machine translation of video, you can cut out a lot of competitors who currently lack the technology to do it reliably. This is a market about differentiating yourself against your competition, not about forcing the user down the path that is easiest for you to support.
No, it's not. (Score:2, Interesting)
What people who are deaf? What about people who are unable to speak? What about people who can speak but choose not to -- such as being in a meeting and needing those network stats right this instant?
Advertisers want us to to 100% video, all the time. Advertisers want us to do 100% speech, all the time. Very few of us in the real world want either of those things.
Need-tested access to accessible works (Score:2)
What people who are deaf? What about people who are unable to speak?
They'd key in their social insurance number and receive a reasonable number of non-video views. It'd be a need-tested exception to the general rule of providing video articles and video ads, in the same way that there's a copyright exception in the United States for books on devices made available only to legally blind people [wikipedia.org].
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Like Church Latin (Score:5, Insightful)
Betteridge's law makes this easy. (Score:2)
No, it's not the end of typing.
Question doesn't match (Score:2)
The question, "Is this the End of Typing?" doesn't match with the story. From what I can tell from the summary, the story seems to be about the fact that there are masses of illiterate people getting online, and it may be better to communicate with those people using audio and video, since they can't read. Also, a lot of these people are in developing countries where infrastructure isn't great, so companies wanting to service them need to find ways to provide an audio/video interaction in that context. O
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These will be annoying times. (Score:2)
We're already past that (Score:2)
Even the so-called "educated" internet users can't write anymore. What they write is littered with L33t-sp34k, "teen speak", shortened words, words turned into acronyms not to mention errors, mistakes and typos. It's also already polluted by images, i.e. emojis.
The end of typing on the internet began when non-computer-nerds started using the Internet.
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As someone more than half a century old I can tell you the hand written notes of the average person in the past weren't so great either.
The end of bad typing (Score:2)
Typing, done well, is fantastic as a means to communicate to a computer. At present many who can't be bothered to learn to type well type with poor technique, slowly, and potentially risking injury. For these, voice input would be a very good idea.
Not for me! (Score:2)
With my disabilities, I don't want to talk and hear due to my impediments. I like to type and read to socialize.
See this in tech forums all the time (Score:2)
A 4 line - do this, do that, click here, done. Not good enough.
"Do you have a video for that?"
The Diamond Age? (Score:2)
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Facebook purchased the company behind WhatsApp, that's all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: That's odd. (Score:2)
I use MX Player too, to play all the videos I've reencoded on my computer. It even managed to play a (low-rez) h.265 video on my four year old tablet.
I just wish they hadn't put in so much intrusive advertising.
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I keep TELLING you people this and you keep scoffing at me. Don't you see it? Too much tech being too 'helpful'. It's making people LAZY.
That would be called knowing your audience. Or targeted marketing.
Lazy is what the future brings. The real question is how the fuck will anyone survive being capable of doing literally nothing. We don't have an economic model that fits that goal.
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We don't have an economic model that fits that goal.
Sure we do, pushing up lilies from six feet under :)
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We don't have an economic model that fits that goal.
Sure we do, pushing up lilies from six feet under :)
A cull is merely a side effect no one wants to recognize or acknowledge. It sounds too crazy for the masses, no matter how inevitable it is.
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Before Eternal September, USENET didn't suffer fools/trolls gladly, and back then, all it took was a couple E-mails to abuse@troll-s.isp.com, and the admins got rid of them quickly, because having one's connections to other NNTP sites pulled was a very useful tool.
To boot, USENET posts will follow you forever. Last year, during a job interview, I actually had an interviewer pull up posts from the early 1990s I had in sci.crypt and alt.sex.cthulhu...
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It is strange ... to look back 25 years in time and see posts that you wrote are still there. It would like be like making a sandcastle on the beach, going back and still seeing it there after all those years.
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