If you want to write Chinese text on a computer - you still have to use Latin alphabet, because it's not possible to put thousands of characters on a keyboard.

So a different writing system for Chinese has already been developed.

Some other languages also have more than one writing system. (Serbian and Azeri).

When mobile phones became accessible to the general public then many people used Latin alphabet to write in Russian, because SMS didn't support Cyrillic properly.

Vietnamese also didn't use Latin originally.

Eh, you can find at least three (Traditional) Chinese input methods on any given modern system, and Pinyin is only one of them. Cangjie and Bopomofo require no understanding to Latin alphabets. Not to mention there are other less used methods such as Boshiamy.

As I understand - Pinyin is still the most popular one. It also is compatible with all standard Latin keyboards and doesn't require touchscreens or microphones. So pretty much all educated Chinese people are familiar with the Latin alphabet. But for most people outside China - the Chinese alphabet looks like gibberish.

Pinyin is used in regions where Simplified Chinese is the predominant written language, but other systems are generally used in regions where traditional Chinese is the written language e.g Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan

And speech to text!

Speech to text is very impractical and error-prone.

Talking to a Chinese-speaking coworker, my understanding had been that speech to text was very popular in China, especially on phones?

Yes it is.

Tangent: Anthropic's CEO worked on Mandarin speech recognition at Baidu: https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02595

OK, but it doesn't work in situations where you don't want others to hear what you type. And in places with lots of noise.

In English I use speech to text a lot (including completely substituting it for typing for a year when I had wrist issues). If your microphone is right next to your mouth and you're using good software it works in surprisingly noisy environments: I can talk quietly directly into my mic on the subway without issues. And when I'm at my desk I use a boom mic next to my mouth, with similar benefits.

Quiet environments were, for me, more of an issue: it combines very poorly with open plan offices since you bother the people around you.

>If you want to write Chinese text on a computer - you still have to use Latin alphabet,

Non-native Chinese-Script language learner - I use touchpad stroke-input on my macbook 50% of the time (and touchscreen stroke input on phone 100% of the time).

This is an interesting question. computers deal in numbers. but were originated in a latin alphabet and are optimized around an alphabet style of processing. while we managed to jam chinese into unicode by treating it as if it were just a big alphabet. this is not entirly correct and there is a lot of information lost in the process[1]. what would a native chinese computer system have looked like?

However note perhaps the simplicity of the latin alphabet(a small set of separated characters) lent itself well to a simple implementation on early computers. which got them out of numerical processing earlier than if they had to speak chinese or even something like arabic where the written language has advanced to the point where the connected cursive form was the only correct form. the rendering of which would be tricky for early computers. note that english has a connected cursive form, the art of which has just about been destroyed by computers.

1. I don't read(or speak) chinese. but the characters are composed of sub characters and stroke order that may provide hints or insight into the nature of the character. Or they may not, I don't know, I don't read chinese.

In Taiwan, they don't use Latin script to type, but a phonetic script based on character radicals called bopomofo

The fact that you can write Chinese in Pinyin does not mean that Pinyin would be a good writing system between humans.

You don’t have to use pinyin to type Chinese on a computer. You can use the zhuyin input method.

Yeah, I imagine it won't be easy. What needs to be assessed is if the gains are worth it.