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Comment by Htsthbjig | Hacker News Reader

"Other tablets are thinner, sleeker, lighter, or easier to use for CONSUMING content, but they're a poor substitute for creating content."

This is what was said of the graphical interface at first, when all the serious applications for creating content were on the command line.

Who uses VisiCalc, Lotus 123 or Wordperfect in the command line anymore?

About creating content, it depends on what you do for a living.

I prefer to talk to my wordprocessor than typing, I prefer to stand with my tablet in my hand when I give a presentation that a computer. A tablet is much better for multiple people looking at the screen that having to move the people to a fixed screen or a laptop with fixed movement.

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> I prefer to talk to my wordprocessor than typing

I'm on the opposite site. If I have a keyboard at hand, I'd never think of using voice recognition. For most people who have ever used a keyboard voice recognition is not an advance, it's a limitation of damage that the lack of a proper keyboard is doing.

However, my father hates typing on his iPhone, so he proudly talks to his phone. Works surprisingly well. Sometime the mails are really funny :-). But it's nowhere as fast or easy comapared to my sister typing at good speed (also on an iPhone).

The voice software on the iPhone is from Nuance, the company that makes Dragon Naturally Speaking. It's actually pretty good. I often use it to write emails, for example. It does go wonky at times. The one thing that is missing is the advanced editing abilities found in the commercial products, which quickly allows you to make corrections. e.g. 'scratch that'

With the commercial packages, voice probably wins over typing, or at least it's very close. See David Pogue's Dragon Dictate Review:

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/hello-computer-speak-your-text-wi...

Additionally, I believe John Siracusa uses Dragon Dictate to write his lengthy (20,000+ words) Mac OS X reviews.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/10/os-x-10-9/23/

Anyway, I don't know if Microsoft rolls their own voice recognition software but providing a more advanced version in the Surface would definitely be a huge plus. Next generation voice software would attract an entirely new audience to the Surface.

In fact, the people who prefer voice to keyboards is probably 100 times larger. Microsoft should optimize for the larger audience.

>Who uses VisiCalc, Lotus 123 or Wordperfect in the command line anymore?

Well... R-stats and ggplot are pretty popular still...

Not strictly answering your question, but I find myself regularly using ed(1) to make quick changes to files.

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