Text is the new GUI?

We've got a software student ( from another University) working on his final year project at my day job. He is busy adding a 'speech' interface to our Laboratory tracking system. The idea is that while the scientist has their hands in the fume cupboard they don't want to be messing with a mouse or a keyboard why not engage with the computer by voice. This is after all how they did it in the old future in the movies.

Alas the student has got a bit sidetracked into the excitement of speech recognition and synthesis, in an attempt to get him to some sort of conclusion of his project I have suggested that most of the academic benefit of the project could be got by just having a text input and output (although useless in the fume cupboard). Once you go there it starts you thinking about how we interact with systems by voice. We are of course now used to listening to SatNav and some folk order their phones to phone the wife.

While pondering this and Georges earlier post of Twitter Library fees, I was thinking about an article about how fans have put together Twitter accounts of their favourite T.V. characters so that we can see when they are having a sandwich during the week. It made me wonder whether we might soon be engaging with various systems through the power of text rather than super 3D graphical interfaces.

This will be a shame as much of the design thought in web design and business application design has been about mice and windows more or less. In Liverpool this has led to some success for the hybrid 'programmer/graphic designer', perhaps if we are going to deal in a flow of text it will be the Hybrid 'programmer/DJ' or at least 'programmer/Linguist' who lead the way.

We surround ourselves in an increasing sense of a flow of consciousness through Twitter/Facebook etc. Surely this is going to include a Twitter from machines.

"Your fridge is enjoying a quiet day."
"Your car is worrying that it's service is due this week."
"Your door notes that fido is standing at it and wants to go out."

This will lead us to a wish to push application outputs into twitter like streams for our apps to respond to our own twitters. Text (or speech) may be the new GUI. Of course we will have to know a lot more about parsing and extracting meaning and identity from these streams of conciousness.