I've been using tablet PCs for the past 4 years now, and though the keyboard will still dominate large-scale text input for some time, the vast majority of my interactions are via stylus, mouse, or touch screen. The success of the Wii further shows that people are looking for a more tactile, intuitive interface.

Yeah, cuz working in a cube farm will be sooo much more productive with everyone talking to their damn PC's. I can just hear it now, too bad I can't think while I'm trying to drown out all that noise.

I remember when Bill was predicting that everything will be connected to the Internet one day.

He is more and more right. People have evolved to have web-access everywhere. On their phones laptops and even their consoles/TVs.

Touch screen and voice recognition is nice on certain applications, but to replace a keyboard is absolutely nonsense.

I have used an iPhone, and like many others, have been frustrated with the touch keyboard. Also, I don't like to have thousands of fingerprints on my monitor.

With voice recognition, you need to have a perfect accent. Or else you will be saying the same word over and over again before the computer gets it right finally.

Also, if there's something you need to type out that's not a word, how will you do this? Spell it out? I can guarantee that I will type faster than you spelling out every character when you try to write a program.

If you were in college and need to type up a paper that's due the next morning, I'm sure your roommate would love to hear you say out loud every word while he/she's trying to sleep.

I think I will be sticking to my keyboard, thank you.

The two things I hate the most about my WinDoze More-Bile device are the tiny little screen and the tiny little keyboard. And if the silly thing can't tell the difference between "Alexandra" and "Google Maps" when controlling it with voice activation, how is it going to replace my keyboard?

[Noel, how did you enter your comment?]

I once thought voice and pen would replace a key board. It is a fact that people can key 60 words a minute. They can only write a max of 30 WPM. Voice is getting better, but noise and vowel understanding by computers present a continued problem. Bob human interface was a Gates vision

Oh give me a break. Gates was a visionary back in the 70's and 80's. He's been totally irrelevant for the last 15 years or so.
The "vision" of electronics devices, home appliances, etc all having ubiquitous network access wasn't all that impressive and Gates was not the only individual nor the first with that idea.

On the topic at hand, I see the concept of general human-computer interface as being separated from text input. Why is he grouping the keyboard and touchscreen/voice recognition into one category?
Until the day that someone creates a replacement that is faster and more efficient at data input, I surely don't see keyboards being replaced. Especially not with any type of voice-recognition or touchscreen. They are used for different purposes. However, I am not saying the keyboard won't evolve. I think some type of hybrid tactile keyboard / multi-touch "slate" interface will be the next big thing, and it will definitely be coming out of that fruit company in Cupertino, CA.

@dave webb: noone said that keyboards won't be used at all. I'm just imagining that Gates was thinking of a "Minority report"-movie type interface.

@wpns: the size of the screen and keys are chosen by you. Pick a phone with a qwerty keyboard integrated if you feel that the keys are too small or that you need to enter lots of text.

I imagine that the new no-keyboard interface will be fully 3d and voice recognicion software (or even hardware) will be a lot more advanced than it is now. - the future is inevitable

AKA Copy cat

I guess you are cherry picking the visions.

When the Amiga computer was on fire and chilled by its own management.

Gate called it a game computer. And said a computer will never need more than 8 colors.

This was back when the IBM PC Compatible was the title of PC's.

When you can explain just that ONE of his many prediction blunders, then you're talking about something...

I don't know about you but the only display I run across less than 8 colors is some ATM machines.

LOL OMG Please, explain how he couldn't envision PC's labeled vista capable actually NOT being capable.

Hmmmmmmmmmmm??????????

"many PCs with the Vista emblem are in fact not able to run many of the Vista features that are advertised in step with the hardware."

www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36186/118

Gates isn't a visionary. He just happens to have the dough to make visions come true. More like a vi$ionary than visionary. :~~

Click with the left foot, track with the right. You would never need to take your hands off of the keyboard.

Then buy one

As noted above, voice is unusable in any non-isolated setting. This idea was generated by Redmond developers who have their own offices with doors that close. Instead of making voice able to do more keyboard-like things (such as entering commands), they should work on making keyboards more versatile and humane (like the OLED-on-key keyboards, if they were more reasonably priced).

The one really great thing about voice control is not the more rapid rate of data entry (since typing speed is rarely the real bottleneck in coding or composing text). The one great thing about voice is that it does not require you to touch a grimy keyboard covered in pathogens. As the rate of antibiotic resistant bacterial infections rises, we will care more about this aspect.