THEY are among the greatest sources of frustration in the workplace: a repository for festering lunch fragments and a leading cause of repetitive strain injury.
But the time may finally be approaching when it is safe to throw away the much hated computer keyboard. Speech recognition - after a series of false dawns - could shortly be coming to a PC near you.
Blazing a trail in the UK is the Scottish Parli
ament, which has offered all staff and MSPs the chance to dump their keyboards and install software which automatically converts speech into text, even allowing for accents and background noise. One member of the Parliament - Nationalist Alasdair Morgan - has already taken up the challenge with gusto and now dictates all his correspondence direct into his PC at Holyrood.
Voice recognition software has been a Holy Grail for computer technicians for decades, and the makers of successive versions of software have promised to consign keyboards to history.
However, consumers have found that the reality often fails to live up to the promises, with users having laboriously to train programmes to recognise their voices and then spend as much time correcting their text as they spent dictating it.
The latest software packages - costing about £150 - claim to work at up to 160 words per minute and can figure out the differences between words that sound the same.
One of the key reasons why they work better is that computers now have faster chips and more memory, which allows more rapid and extensive examination of sounds. Morgan said: "I had already used voice recognition software on my computer at home, so I was glad to have the chance to use at Holyrood.
"I found it works best if you take the time to train it so it gets used to the accent. Some of my fellow MSPs see me talking into the headset on the computer and wonder what I'm doing, but I find that it works very well.
"I find that I would use it for all but a very short one or two word e-mail. If I have a lot of letters and e-mails and reports to get through then I will use this. And I can do it very quickly."
A Scottish Parliament spokeswoman said: "It's being made available for MSPs to use for their own correspondence and we think that the technology has a lot of potential to help them."
In July, the United States Attorney's Office, which employs 15,000 staff across the US, installed speech recognition software on its machines in order to ease the workload on staff.
Speech recognition programmes include IBM ViaVoice, iListen for the Mac, and Talk It Type It.
The software offered by the Scottish Parliament, and being used by the US Attorney's Office, Nuance Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9, costs about £150 and the firm claims up to 99% accuracy.
Simon Howard, Nuance UK productivity applications manager, said: "There have been a number of developments which make speech recognition much more efficient than in the past.
"The software itself is improving, but computers are ever-more powerful and sound cards and microphones are getting better. That makes a considerable difference.
"And we've dealt with the issue of background noise. It used to be that you had to record noises, like a door shutting, so the computer would know to ignore them."
But Stephen Brewster, professor of computing at Glasgow University, warned that problems remained.
He said: "Voice-recognition software is getting better all the time, that's right. But it is still some way from being perfect. Every time you make some progress, you still realise that there is still so much to do."
