Bill Gates, Chairman of Microsoft sees a bright future for PCs that support multiple user interfaces including touch, pen and voice input. At the Tech-Ed conference, Bill said the following:
"There's a number of technologies that our research group and others have been working on for these decades that are now moving into the mainstream. It's a combination of software advances, and hardware power that allow us to bring new interaction techniques to a mainstream world. We collectively refer to these as natural user interface, but it's several different things. It's the idea of touch panel, and we gave a glimpse just last week of some of Windows 7, and the thing we chose to highlight there was this touch support, and how we built that in and made that easy for developers, and how end users will like that.
We've also got the pen capability that we're taking to a whole new level in terms of easy recognition, and how that is implemented in the hardware. I think of every student having a device that avoids the need for paper textbooks. The tablet device will let them take notes, record audio, connect to the Internet. It will be superior in every way, and yet it can't be purely keyboard based. It has to have this touch and pen as well.
We also have the speech recognition. On the phone today, if you call up information, that is a piece of software from a Microsoft group called TellMe that's taking those information calls, and we're building up the database, the speech model, of people in general, and people specifically to allow that speech interaction to be very rich. And as so we look out over the next decade, the way you interact with that cell phone, speech will be a major part of it.
The final natural interface piece, one that I think is perhaps the most important of all, is vision. A camera is very inexpensive, and putting software behind it that can tell what it's seeing allows you to have gestures, and movements, things that will be used in a variety of settings. We put out our Microsoft Surface product that actually uses a camera to project up onto a table surface, and there you can point with your hands, or put objects on the table, and the software sees them. It's being used in retail stores, and as that price comes down, that would be in every office, it will be in every home. Your desk won't just have a computer on it, it will have a computer in it. And your whiteboard will be intelligent. You can walk up, take information, expand it, point to somebody's name, start a teleconference with them, sit there and exchange information. And so natural interface really has a pretty dramatic impact on making these tools of empowerment, the personal computer, making them pervasive, and looking at them in new ways."
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