They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well that’s good because it’s going to make it much easier to get messages out in 140 characters then.

Communication is rapidly changing, I don’t think anyone would disagree with this point. The design of technology is to get as much information across as possible in as little time as possible. Getting messages to people used to take weeks via mail, then a few minutes via a phone call, and now seconds in the form of texts, tweets, and other asynchronous forms of communication.

But we can still make things shorter. Right now we have to take time to type and compose the actual messages, but this is going to change in the future, especially with the popularization of wearables.

A couple distinct trends seem to be happening that will mostly like converge into what communication will look like tomorrow.

The first is the use of smart watches. The several people I’ve talked to about the watch have all said the same thing, it’s good at checking but not composing. The watch design is not built for the same intuitive keyboard design that we’re used to. Instead, it’s great at one-bit communication, where a simple tap, double tap, or hold can be used to transmit thoughts (this is almost like a throwback to morse code).

Using the simple gestures that the watch allows, we can quickly respond and answer things that don’t need meaningful thought. In fact, we’ve already seen some examples of one-bit messaging systems like Yo or Yes/No. But soon we might see other template responses like “I’ll be there soon”, “I’ll call you in a minute”, or “Not again, I’ll make sure to put the dog on a leash” (depending on what kind of lifestyle you live…). Programmed one-bit messaging templates are going to make communicating much faster. This is an efficiency issue here, but in less safe parts of the world those moments can save lives (one of Yo’s most meaningful partnerships was the ability to alert Israeli citizens of oncoming missles).

The second trend is the rising use of pictures, emojis, and gifs as a means of relaying thoughts. There’s an entire collection of emoji apps on Product Hunt, well-funded apps based on gif searching, and now you can apparently order from Dominoes with a single emoji tweet. A lot more information comes from seeing an image than reading text; saying “good job!” Doesn’t invoke the same reaction as seeing this gif with Rob Lowe. With the rise of emojis and easily searchable image libraries, sending images is going to become a lot more common in the future. We’re already seeing asynchronous video messaging via Snapchat, at a certain point it might be easier to respond to a text by taking a short video from your watch instead.

So what does the future look like? Maybe triple tapping my watch auto-orders from my favorite seamless restaurant. Or maybe swiping right on my keyboard sends the text template “how far away are you?” I’ll be able respond instantly to an OpenTable reservation with the Yes/No integration, or the next generation of news headlines are entirely emojis (better than clickbait). Guess all that work with wingdings might actually come in handy.