Textwalkers: Do They Need A Heads-Up?

"Another is to make people feel bad -- that their behavior is just the wrong thing to do." He recalls the "crying Indian" commercial that no one who grew up in the '70s can forget, which portrayed littering as a sin against Mother Earth.

"Another angle is ridicule. Make people feel stupid for doing this." The word "jaywalker" was deployed in the early days of the automobile to make people who walked in the streets feel like country bumpkins, Norton notes in his book "Fighting Traffic." It worked. They got out of the way of the automobiles.

The real solution to any purported plague of textwalking is that all this tiny keyboard technology is going to be largely obsolete in two to three years, says Michael Wehrs, who works for Nuance Communications, one of those blazingly hot tech firms that give people titles like "vice president, evangelism" which, sure enough, is what it says on his business card.

Nuance is the creator of the best-selling Dragon NaturallySpeaking software that turns the spoken word into text. After years of laughable results, Dragon and its competitors are getting so good as to cause serious unemployment among transcriptionists. The fat target now is to move beyond desktop and laptop computers and into phones. Check out Nuance's "Man vs. Machine" stunt on YouTube, where it pits what is billed as the world's fastest texter against its voice recognition handheld, and the texter goes the way of John Henry that steel-driving man.

Nuance is in the business of getting rid of all keyboards, worldwide, soon. Well maybe not all keyboards. "I don't want to come across as -- under all circumstances, our corporate mission is to eliminate the use of texting in terms of keyboard entry," says Wehrs.

He can see occasions, for example, when no matter how accurate the software is at turning speech into text, you will want to use a keyboard. Like when you're in a noisy bar.

But Wehrs absolutely sees the day coming soon when your strong preference will be to talk to your computer, not type at it. Like Spock, on "Star Trek." In 2008, Nuance expects to ship a quarter of a billion copies of its software that allows you to call somebody by speaking the person's name. It's getting so common that many people worldwide don't even realize their cheap phones can do that.

The only time you will want to let your thumbs do the talking, Wehrs thinks, is when you are being driven wildly, toweringly mad by the speech your boss is giving.

But if you're walking while doing that, you may have bigger problems than whacking a potted plant.