Keyboards? We don’t need no stinking keyboards ... and maybe we don’t need no stinking ISP either. Phones ... you may have heard of them ... as well as what seems to be significant recent improvements in voice recognition, and VoiceXML for integration of your spoken commands with data along with more natural speech synthesis are smoothly evolving into a service environment accessible from anywhere that, in most cases where encountered, is being built from the ground up to be a whole lot simpler to use and much more friendly than services reached by whacking on a keyboard and mousing through web pages ... maybe even more friendly than the real world. OK so Verizon Customer Service (555-1611) didn’t actually have much help for Paul and had to hand him over to a "repair representative" on multiple occasions so he could hear pleasantly spun stories from a real person about how there was a "local problem" that support crews would "resolve in a few hours" each time he called during the week that his voice mail was down ... but what about Ticketmaster (1-800-347-0808) where Evan’s purchase of tickets for Cyndi Lauper at the Melody Tent was handled completely by speaking to very intelligent and helpful software ... well, handled at least up to the point where he couldn’t understand the section number where his tickets were and had to go to Ticketmaster online to learn this ... Evan is taking the blame for this one.

Then there’s Tellme at 1-800-555-TELL where Evan can get scores or news or weather at 3 in the morning when he wakes up with a need to know ... he keeps his cell phone under his pillow for just that purpose. Or the Walgreens automated phone service where Mary renews the prescriptions that keep her healthy and sane. And now Mina had the new improved Yahoo-By-Phone where she could get her email as well as those same scores, news and weather that Evan gets from Tellme.

Can it get any better? Yes and it will. Wouldn’t voice accessible Ebay be an even more fun way to spend money on things like Stars-Behind-Bars playing cards? You know it would be.

I’m thinking that unless you’re setting up your information for easy access by phone or your web pages to be driven by server-side voice logic from a phone or maybe Voice-Over-IP then your design is so laughably last millennium as to be already nearly useless. Wake up and hear the voices along with the rest of us.