Handwriting And Speech Recognition Macs?

A few days ago, Apple announced a patent filling involving voice recognition, and one of their recent job announcements made me think about very interesting things to come... and despite the fact the following is nothing more but my personal expectations and some speculations of the facts we know, I think there are some chances to see Apple turning the dream into reality in the coming years.


What was I talking about? Well, think about the keyboard and the mouse - for a lot of Apple users, they are the weak link of the entire system, and I am not talking about those that end up returned to Apple for various problems...

The idea is this - Apple is currently hiring a new handwriting recognition engineer, and in the job description you can read that this person is going to be involved in "advancing Apple's handwriting recognition technology for Mac OS X." So far, so good, but what about taking out the keyboard and the mouse from the landscape of the future?

In my opinion, handwriting and speech recognition shouldn't be just additional features. I can't imagine how I will get used to use a computer without keyboard and mouse, but I would rather dictate my articles instead of writing them. In fact, a direct brain-to-computer would be even faster, but let's not go too far!

To end this, here's my prediction: in the next decade, maybe we'll have keyboards and mouses too but, at least in some high end or custom Macs, we could have only speech and handwriting recognition, as solutions to control the computer. What do you think - is this the way of the future, or not?