I wasn't trying to prove anything with my experiences, I was disproving your assumptions. It takes a lot of supporting evidence to prove something, it only takes one counter example to disprove something.

This one should be simple enough for you to grasp but I look forward to your completely misguided and illogical response.

If you could grasp context you would understand that it's not ironic. The whole point of my comment was to give you examples from MY personal experience that show your statements are incorrect.

I never said that the majority of the world's population uses T9 but it was poor phrasing on my part. I meant that the majority of the world uses feature phones and those feature phones almost all come with some type of T9 like input. It was beside the point anyways.

I wonder if you'll ever realize that making overreaching generalizations with zero supporting evidence, other than your own biased personal experience, isn't going to convince anyone of anything and only makes you sound dumber.

You're either extremely ignorant, extremely stubborn, or a troll. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're the latter at this point. Otherwise, I hope you're better at programming than arguing why keyboards are becoming obsolete.

Formatting got screwed up before, so here it is in an easier to parse format.

This is pretty ironic coming from someone who is clearly out of touch with reality. Almost every statement you make is a blanket assumption and most of them probably aren't even true for average person. Just because what you do and where you work allows you use voice recognition does not mean that the entire population has those circumstances.

I DO text on the bus and any other form of public transportation, all the time. And I wouldn't want other people to hear my conversation, not just for my sake but out of respect for other people's space as well (although not everyone shares this feeling, as many of us have probably experienced).

Where I work NOONE uses headsets. As with the last comment, it would be extremely rude and annoying if myself or one of my colleagues were talking into their computer all day. Not EVERYONE works in an isolated cubicle or somewhere else that provides a level of sound insulation.

The majority of people in the world don't even use smartphones yet. A touchtone phone with T9 is still the norm for the majority of the world's population. Those people aren't about to switch to voice recognition anytime soon. So realize that keyboards will play a role for the majority of the world for a long time, they're not about to become obsolete anytime soon. I'm glad you're privileged enough with a compatible enough line of work to use voice dictation but perhaps you should try to fix your narrow world view.

Seriously, you're grasping at straws and you have been for a while with all your generalizations and false assumptions. I don't think anyone will disagree that voice dictation is going to become a bigger part of our life but you're kidding yourself if you think that keyboards are going to disappear from the world or even smartphones in 20 years.

So, back to reality (which you seem not to want to do) This is pretty ironic coming from someone who is clearly out of touch with reality. Almost every statement you make is a blanket assumption and most of them probably aren't even true for average person. Just because what you do and where you work allows you use voice recognition does not mean that the entire population has those circumstances. Almost nobody writes texts on the bus I DO text on the bus and any other form of public transportation, all the time. And I wouldn't want other people to hear my conversation, not just for my sake but out of respect for other people's space as well (although not everyone shares this feeling, as many of us have probably experienced). People in offices use headsets Where I work NOONE uses headsets. As with the last comment, it would be extremely rude and annoying if myself or one of my colleagues were talking into their computer all day. Not EVERYONE works in an isolated cubicle or somewhere else that provides a level of sound insulation. The majority of people in the world don't even use smartphones yet. A touchtone phone with T9 is still the norm for the majority of the world's population. Those people aren't about to switch to voice recognition anytime soon. So realize that keyboards will play a role for the majority of the world for a long time, they're not about to become obsolete anytime soon. I'm glad you're privileged enough with a compatible enough line of work to use voice dictation but perhaps you should try to fix your narrow world view. Seriously, you're grasping at straws and you have been for a while with all your generalizations and false assumptions. I don't think anyone will disagree that voice dictation is going to become a bigger part of our life but you're kidding yourself if you think that keyboards are going to disappear from the world or even smartphones in 20 years.

There's no way it would be faster than an optimal swype based system. Shorthand works well for a small subset of words, once you need to use a word outside of that subset you need to start "spelling" the word out in shorthand. This would be drastically slower than using swype.

This isn't strictly simulated annealing. We are aware of the similarities and we mention it in the article, simulated annealing was the motivation for our approach. However, to be considered a proper simulated annealing algorithm you're fitness function has to be in the form of a Boltzmann distribution, which ours was not although it could have been.

Here is an image of the QWERTY keyboard with each letter highlighted by it's frequency of use. The Google Trillion Word database (refined to ignore typos and misspellings, so containing ~100,000 of the most commonly used words in the English language) was used as the input. http://sangaline.com/blog/opti...

There are literally tens of thousands of people who have downloaded alternative keyboards for their smartphones, it's not too hard to find out app statistics. I would be careful projecting your personal laziness/stubbornness to the entire population. There 320 million people in the U.S., that means even the "outliers" number in the millions. And yes, I know at least five people that use the Dvorak keyboard.

You should try actually reading the article before making comments about it. In particular, I think you'll find the section titled "Conclusions" of interest. Also, plenty of people use alternative keyboards so you're last point is a bit of an exaggeration.

You're right, people do get lazier after they adjust to using a new input mechanism and their error rate goes up. The same thing would likely happen if people used the keyboard we presented but there would be fewer errors than you get on a QWERTY keyboard. The main point of the analysis was to reduce the total number of possible errors.

First, I just want to say that the purpose of the analysis wasn't to design a new keyboard to try and get people to switch to. We just thought it was an interesting problem and wanted to see what it looked like. But I disagree with you, there are plenty of people who took the time to learn/use the Dvorak keyboard. It's a small fraction of the population but it's not an insignificant number of people. I agree that pointless changes like the ones you mentioned in GIMP are annoying and detrimental but retraining yourself to improve efficiency at some task is not unheard of.