Hi, John,

Your letter points out that the spead of computer functions and the abilities they enable, into areas of endeavour that previously did not do (whatever), is ongoing. My point is that 'typing' in the way of data entry is also being done even more.

The promise of voice entry of large amounts of data has still not been realized. Even speaker-dependant voice entry - where the program is 'trained' to recognize the speech of a specific user - has not come to the point where it can replace a data entry function using a keyboard. I've worked with these programs since 1983 when I wrote a device driver for a voice-input board; it's been a sort of interest since.

Last year I worked with a company that does nursing support in the community based on assignments from a government agency - the forms to be input into data systems run to 20 pages per client, with 100s a day at each branch. Their systems had to be designed not to use a mouse so that the data entry people didn't have to break up the work-flow. 'Typing' is still the most cost effective in that environment.

For my work (writing, testing, and debugging code, mostly), I still need as big a screen as I can get, with 10 window open at once, and a keyboard.

As new technologies become more effective, and hold-out areas of work embrace these (like government that insists on sending paper forms), I agree that the old ways will go. How old do you have to be, do you suppose, to find people who have actually used a typewriter? My daughters are in their 20s now, and they've never used one.

I'm delighted to hear that doctors are able to find time to enter notes while the information is fresh in their minds. The quadraplegic that I did the voice-entry driver for, had his life turned around entirely, and that was many years ago.

-larry


>Larry
>
>>>have you tried to 'type' on a PDA? Or 'write'? At 120 wpm, maybe?
>
>"typing" is not the pinnacle of data entry. We do it because until now, there was no better way.



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>The whole paradigm changes with the pda. It is based around speech and option selection more than typing text. No matter how quickly you type, you cannot type as quickly as you speak.
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>You only have to look at rapid throughput industries (such as medicine) to see the truth of this. Busy doctors seeing 70 patients in a 2 hour clinic spend a few moments dictating care between patients. Even the most techo-aware of us agree we do not have time to type the details between patients. Numerous systems have been set up on the assumption that typing will happen; at 18 months the failure/unreliability rate approaches 100%.
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>With the pda, even luddite doctors are seeing benefits and are entering details as we go. Look at pdamd.com for some case studies.
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>Regards
>
>JR