The Third UI : The Rise & Fall of the Keyboard

I remember the day I received it : my first Blackberry. A few weeks later I lost it in the back of a taxi cab in Paris. But I haven’t forgotten the chiclet keyboard, its subtle click with each keypress.

A year later, the iPhone presented the world with an all glass keyboard. Who would type on a flat surface, detractors asked? In the end, all of us.

This week, I saw another user interface for a phone : dictation only.

I pressed the microphone to start dictating a message into Gmail, & the keyboard disappeared, replaced by a single thin bar at the bottom. There are three functions : delete, autosuggest, & full keyboard.

This is the future : no keyboards. Voice will become the dominant interface for humans with computers.

Speaking is at least 3 times faster than typing. It’s more human - since after all, it’s how we communicate with each other.

The technology has improved massively. Modern AI transcription models combine both voice-to-text transcription & AI to improve grammar structure & diction.

The result? Text that reads as eloquently as you think you sound in your head.

It’s also the hottest trend in software development. Vibe coding : dictating what you want to code with speech into an AI.

If even the most technical of us prefer voice, the next step is obvious : a laptop without a keyboard.

Soon that collection of QWERTY squares will look as archaic as Hemingway’s Underwood typewriter - a relic of a bygone era.