I happened to see an online touch typing tutor and it brought back some pleasant memories but also raised some intriguing questions for the future.  I remember at university it made sense for me to acquire a Smith Corona typewriter and use that for typing my reports, since my handwriting was rapidly deteriorating given the speed at which notes must be taken.

I accordingly used a touch typing tutor, which at that time was a printed book.  I have never regretted the time I spent and it has made me much more efficient whenever I keyboard.  Clearly having an online tutor where you can practice and easily measure your performance is very much better.  However given the evolution of technology, whether you should learn touch typing is an interesting question.

Typing On Mobile Devices

The dilemma about learning touch typing arises because we are now increasingly moving to mobile devices.  So often these are becoming extremely small and this is a major challenge for average fingers.  Because of this, the smart phone technology is attempting to avoid the need for pecking away at keyboard buttons.  This can be done either with or without a smartphone interface that looks like a keyboard.

Swype

If you have an android smartphone then you may well have seen the Swype application. Acknowledging the difficulty of hitting miniscule keys with average fingers, Swype allows you to move your fingers over the letters in a word and the software will attempt to insert the word you had in mind.  If your character path is difficult for the software to provide a single word, it will give you a choice of words from which you can select what you had in mind.

For more details, you can check a video made by Robert Scoble on his meeting with the Swype creators.  Having used Swype on my Samsung Galaxy Android phone, I can say that although not perfect, it does a credible job.  It does of course grapple with a paradox.  Here we have a sound technology device, which is attempting to receive input via a physical stroking action.

Voice Technology

The more natural way to get data into a smartphone is to use voice technology.  Most smartphones do have this capability although in some cases the functionality may be limited.  The Android phone for example does allow you to create text messages by speaking into the device and it works fairly well although not with 99% accuracy.

These two alternative technologies for inputting messages into your smartphone seem likely to be what is used by most visitors.  Touch typing would be completely inappropriate here.

Typing for Desktop Devices

Mobile devices may be used in ever increasing numbers but there will always be a significant usership for desktop PCs, which do use keyboards of sufficient size to make touch typing a useful approach.  However voice technology such as Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking is becoming extremely fast and accurate and can be used with desktop computers.  It is used for the SMM blogs for example with reasonable success.

Touch Typing Is Hard To Beat

Even though voice technology can be used with a desktop PC and does give some speed advantages, it is never 100% correct.  Where unusual vocabulary is being used, the success rate may drop.  The Dragon Naturally Speaking software can be trained to recognize the unusual words perhaps said with an unusual accent.  However there may always be small amounts of text where it is appropriate to go back to keyboarding.

If this is your situation, then like me, you may find it very worthwhile to spend a little time with an online touch typing tutor to improve your total effectiveness.

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