‘The end of the keyboard is near’: Christian Klein predicts voice translation will be the next workplace advantage

The English engineer, Henry Mill, submitted the first-ever patent for a "machine transcribing letters" in 1714. It never actually went into production, but it was a forerunner of the typewriter and then the electronic keyboard: 312 years later, Christian Klein, CEO of software giant SAP, is noting the end of an era. "The end of the keyboard is near," he tells me. "When you encounter voice recognition from many of these large language models, [it] is super strong. Now we have to do some work to translate voice into business language and business data." The deleterious effects of AI on the humble keyboard might not be top of the list of business leaders' priorities when it comes to mapping out the technological future.