Ya-Qin Zhang believes the days of keyboards coming between people and their computers are numbered.
The managing director of Microsoft's research centre in Beijing sees a time in the not too distant future when typing and even the point and click of a mouse become far less common as users interact with their machines the same way they would with another person.
'We see radical changes coming in the way people interface with their computer,' Mr Zhang said. 'Pen and voice and vision will become the main ways of interaction. The keyboard has become the bottleneck for the PC user experience and that will have to change.'
The technology to allow computers to recognise speech or handwriting has been available for some time, but it has been relatively cumbersome to use and often inaccurate.
Research breakthroughs and the increased power of PCs have added improvements to the point where widespread change in the way people and machines communicate is no longer a question of if, but when.
Mr Zhang said his researchers already had developed software that learned to emulate a person's voice after only 10 minutes of training. Once learned, the application can replicate a user's voice to read text. Using the software, e-mail could be read to the recipient in the sender's voice.