Cell phones are now giving more options to please you.
According to a report by Priya Ganapati of Wired Dot Com, buttons on Cell Phones are pretty much on their way out. Five years from now, it is likely that the mobile phone you will be holding will be a smooth, sleek brick a piece of metal and plastic with a few grooves in it and little more.
Like Apple's iPhone, it will be mostly display; unlike the iPhone, it will be much more than just a touchscreen - it will respond to voice commands and gestures as well as touch.
Specialists predict that Mobile interface design has to mimic the touch, sight, gesture and auditory feeds that we use to interact with our environment. That means speaking to your phone rather than typing, pointing with your finger instead of clicking on buttons, and gesturing instead of touching. You could listen to music, access the internet, use the camera and shop for gadgets by just telling your phone what you want to do, by waving your fingers at it, or by aiming its camera at an object you're interested in buying.
Over the last few years, advances in display technology and processing power have turned smartphones into capable and smaller versions of computers. As a result, phones have gone beyond traditional audio communication and texting to support a wide range of multimedia and office applications.
The one thing that hasn't changed, until recently, is the tiny keypad. Sure, there have been some tweaks, such as T9 predictive text input that cuts down on the time it takes to type, a QWERTY keyboard instead of a 12-key one, or the touchscreen version of a keyboard found on the iPhone. But basically, the act of telling your phone what to do still involves the use of your fingers, specially your thumbs!
Experts say the industry needs a new wave of interface technologies to transform how we relate to our phones. The traditional keypads and scroll wheels will give way to advanced speech recognition and motion sensors.
In the future, instead of a single large screen that is fragile and smudged by fingerprints, phone designers could create products with multiple touch screens.
Users could also interact with their phone by simply speaking to it using technology from companies such as Massachusetts (USA) based Vlingo.
Vlingo's application allows users to command their phones by voice. That could enable you to speak the URLs for web pages or dictate e-mail messages!
Natural speech recognition has long been a challenging affair for human-computer interface researchers. Most devices with speech-recognition capabilities require users to speak commands in an artificially clear way. They also tend to have high error rates, leading to unpopularity.
Unlike conventional voice-recognition technologies, which require specific applications built to recognize selected language commands, Vlingo uses a more open-ended approach.
User voice commands are captured as audio files and transferred over the wireless connection to a server, where they're processed. The technology personalizes itself for each individual user, recognizing and training itself based on the individual user's speech patterns.
"If you say Boston and it shows up as Austin you can correct it on screen," says Vlingo CEO Dave Grannan. "And when you make the correction you are training the system."
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