Future Phones to Read Your Voice, Gestures

By Priya Ganapati


Buttons are 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 the iPhone, it will be mostly display; unlike the iPhone, it will respond to voice commands and gestures as well as touch.

"So much of how we understand technology is visually driven," says Rachel Hinman, a strategist with Adaptive Path, a user-experience and design-consulting firm. "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, if tiny, 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 fundamentally, the act of telling your phone what to do still involves a lot of thumb-twiddling.

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 haptics, advanced speech recognition and motion sensors.

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