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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

I am more concerned about gen z never being taught to type with 10 fingers.

There is also a fair number of people who can't read an analog clock...

talk about a useless skill these days. That said I have 4 analog clocks on the wall as decorations for Austin, NYC, London, and Tokyo like the old newsrooms. Yes they are all set to the atomic standard via RF

No one taught me to type, and I can touch type.

My girlfriend has always typed with 2 fingers and still types faster than me.

Touch typing is not necessary to type fast.

If that's the case you can't be typing very fast in the first place. Two finger typing caps out at around 60-70wpm

That is as fast as most people think though so it is good enough. I'm still glad I learned to use all 10 fingers, but that is to spread the strain out. Typing speed is not the limit for most people

The average speaking rate is >100 WPM. I really doubt most people think at only 60 WPM. Try transcribing a normal person having a normal conversation and you'll quickly see how difficult it is even as a fast typer.

How many of those spoken words are words that are (rightfully) excised when transcribed into a written document? There's a lot of filler in speech.

>Try transcribing a normal person having a normal conversation and you'll quickly see how difficult it is even as a fast typer.

I type at around 120 wpm and I can't keep up with my speaking speed. When I transcribe my own recording I have to constantly pause the recording to catch up. Speaking is "bursty", where you say a lot of things very quickly and then slow down again.

It is for most people though. I certainly have seen some self taught people type quickly but it's not the norm. I learned typing and do 80-100 words per minute. I have seen very few hunt and peck typists that can reach that rate. It's also not nearly as efficient. I think it should be taught in high school at least for a semester. It's only getting more useful rather than less.

I was doing something in my college class this week and I wanted my students to follow along typing what I typed. I was amazed at how slowly they typed.

I also show them ctrl+F and they think I'm a magician...

The ones that care do.

Don't worry. They will just use touch screens soon enough.

Or will just rely on speech to text tools

Or just use voice input. Writing as a whole may decline as technology advances.

There's just one problem: privacy. I don't have that when using voice input. Writing won't decline in favor of voice input until we find a way to make it private. Tangential to this, smart glasses won't replace smartphones either for the same reason.

Make that privacy and accents. There are too many regions where choice recognition just won't work without essentially building new voice models. And that's before we get to people using their second/third/... language.

Viable on-device speech recognition is becoming reality. Apple is apparently processing some speech recognition on-device now: https://www.engadget.com/ios-15-siri-on-device-app-privacy-1...

So far there aren't any particularly good open source voice recognition models though, in large part due to a lack of training data. You can (and should!) contribute to Common Voice to help change that: https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en

No matter what software you use, everyone standing next to you can hear the entire message you're composing.

I think in the later books in the Enders Game series (Speaker for the Dead, in particular), Ender speaks to his AI companion via subvocalization.

So perhaps a little sensor on or in our neck will allow us to speak to computers silently.

may not work so well if you want to write something in an area where other people are talking or with a TV/podcast in the background.

Using all 10 fingers is a pain.

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