Microsoft's Home Of Tomorrow Has No Bathroom

Starman9x writes "Over at the The Toronto Star reporter Rachel Ross got a tour of Microsoft's home of the future. She writes with an appropriate amount of humor, given all the easy targets Microsoft has set up. While the writeup is light and witty, there is an unspoken Orwellian undertone to it -- after all, do we really want Microsoft to have that much control over things?"

Comments

Speech recognition a challenge?

[digitalcowboy]

But that's to be expected. Speech recognition is one of the technology challenges currently facing software developers. If the system worked right now they'd move it to Microsoft's house of today, a nearby showroom officially known as the Consumer Experience Center where the company shows off current technology.

Perhaps if the system worked right now, they'd call it Macintosh OS X.

Seriously, Mac speech recognition has (quietly) gotten pretty good, just recently. For nearly ten years it's been one of those things that I play with occasionally and think, "When they get this right, it's gonna be cool."

It's now very cool. With an hour or so of set up, a few nights ago, I can now surf the web (among many other tasks) completely hands free. I say, "Drudge" and Safari opens drudgereport.com. I say, "move page down" and it scrolls. I say, "Weather" and weather.com is loaded. I say, "Switch to..." and it switches to whatever app I want, already running or not.

All while iTunes is playing.

Any keyboard shortcut can be defined in one app or system-wide to be triggered by any spoken word or phrase you choose.

Combine it with Applescript and.... shell scripts and... this is VERY cool.

Mac users, if you haven't tried Speech stuff on your Mac recently, try it again with 10.2.

I recently demonstrated it to a neighbor who only knows Windows and his response was, "So how much would it cost me to get a Mac that can do that?"

Microsoft, once again, is WAY behind the curve.