Microsoft Voice Command Almost Here

PDA User writes "The new Microsoft Voice Command for Pocket PC isn't supposed to be out until the next Comdex, but someone inside the company posted details to Handango and Geekzone posted a preview. The application notifies users of appointments, and answer simple English questions. It does not have "Do you want fries with that?" in the vocabulary though."

Comments

Star Trek again?

[Polly_was_a_cracker]

"...brings to the Pocket PC world that feeling of "Star Trek", some of the stuff we used to dream of while watching the movies on TV. Like Dr Spock saying "computer, where is Captain Kirk now?",

What gives?

Uhhh...so?

[hargettp]

Okay, so I'm a new Mac user who is currently has a pro-Apple bias after replacing my Sony Vaio Linux laptop with a PowerBook. But: Apple has had voice recognition built into the operating system for a *while* as part of their support for Assistive Devices and disabled users. And, btw, the voice support on Mac OS X is seriously good: out of the box, you can control many of your standard applications, just by turning on the speech recognition feature. Sure, the recognizer is not designed to recognize arbitrary sentences and, indeed, uses a state machine model to recognize compound expressions. But, still, how is MS adding this to one of their OS's a big deal? It's not really that innovative--is it?

Voice as a tool

[mugnyte]

Ever sit on a bus or plane and listen to someone talk? If the topic isn't compelling, does it drive you nuts? People strolling down the sidewalk with headset cell phones still scare me, given the conditioned response I have from the crazy citizens that inhabit my town. Do you use a digital voice recorder to dictate notes? It's used in movies and TV to provide a easy device for monologues, but how popular is voice?

The alternative, tiny keyboards or crazy script can be good or bad, bu voice isn't going to be more than just another sub-division of users who think murmuring to their PDA is fun. In fact, there's no perfect input except for those crazy fsking monkeys and their mechanical arms!

Re:expecting too much?

[tchapin]

I have some experience with that, as I design telephony-based speech applications. Based on user feedback, when a computer comfirms an utterance, the callers / users feel like they have had to tell the computer what they wanted a second time. If confirmation happens more than minimally, they hate it. The caller-perceived increase in talk time is much greater than the actual increase in talk time.

Since the speec rec engines return confidence scores, the application knows how confident it is in the recognition results. It can then accept, reject, or confirm the utterance as necessary. The only times we ever set confirmation to always happen is when some sort of irrecovable transaction is happening and mistakes can't be tolerated.

Todd