While Keyboards are important, speech-to-text technology has come a long way since its inception. Although there always will be value in writing one letter after another, reports about Apple’s new keyboard technology continues to push the boundaries of text input. Driven by the controversial innovations of the latest generation of MacBook keyboards, Apple’s current technology directions imply where the company might be innovating in the future when it comes to text.
When it comes to the traditional hardware keyboards, reliability is the key factor. While Apple has received a lot of backlash for the feel of its new generation MacBook keyboards, the critical concern has been a general sense that the design is unreliable because any stray crumb or a speck of dust can stop the keys from functioning. As evidenced by Apple’s new patent, it is specifically trying to prevent keyboards from getting jammed with junk.
In their quest to make the keyboards thinner, Apple has pushed its keyboard designs thinner as well. Although this has reduced the ‘travel’ of the key, Apple has compensated it with added audio and tactile effects like a crunchy feedback that can be quite satisfying.
Coming to touchscreens, the touch base has all the advantages of an iPhone screen, and it does fall short because you have to look down to see where you’re meant to be touching rather than being able to orientate by feel as you can with the physical keyboard. To solve this dilemma, Apple’s Taptic Engine comes to the rescue, which is embedded in the iPhones and trackpad and provides direct feedback in the form of vibrations or small taps indication finger positioning.
Maybe a future touch-based input device will couple haptics with pressure sensitivity to guard against accidental presses like in the 3D Touch and Force Touch, along with using Apple’s advanced image-recognition hardware like in iPhone X’s TrueDepth sensors, FaceTime cameras and the A11 Bionic processor, to sense the exact position of your hands over the touchscreen input area on a future laptop. Although it sounds a bit like sci-fi, today you can buy an iPhone that maps your face and unlocks itself when it recognizes you.
If you consider replacing the physical keyboards with touchscreen input areas, it might prove to be a lot more than beneficial. When you are not typing, that area can be used for other gestures, to display alternate information, or become a drawing surface for pen input. Besides, if Apple replaced the MacBook keyboard with a wide Touch Bar, the result would be devastating, but with the ingenious application of new technology, a future advancement of the touch bar could really do the job that the physical keyboard does today.