Windows Speech Recognition Getting Some Respect
When our new speech recognition for Windows Vista was demonstrated at the Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting this past August, it went disastrously (read about it at my personal blog, along with links to the video).
As I said in that posting, I was angry at first because the high-profile failure didn't need to happen (Larry Osterman explains the technical details). But at the same time, I know our technology was good, and as a side benefit, the fallout from the demo would give WSR more recognition.
Now that Windows Vista is getting more attention in the mainstream technology press, people are trying out WSR and discovering that it works pretty well. Here's what Jupiter Research analyst Michael Gartenberg had to say:
"I’ve been using the integrated speech recognition in Windows Vista for the last few days, for a variety of tasks and in a variety of applications. I’m pleased to say it works well, and greatly improves the usability of my computer for entering text. It’s so darn good, it feels a little bit out of science fiction. But then again, isn’t that the way technology is supposed to work?"
Thanks to Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for pointing this out.
Comments
Anonymous
December 13, 2006
Hi Chuck, I was wondering if it was possible for you to post an example of using System.Speech.Recognition that works on Vista RTM? There are no samples for recognition in the Windows SDK that I could find - they are all TTS. The new managed code interface is great, but I can only get my code to work on XP SP2. (see http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=999592&SiteID=1) Either that or post up a 'we know about this problem' guys type entry :) thanksAnonymous
December 13, 2006
Thanks CJ for commenting. I've been meaning to post some recognition samples here for quite awhile now.We're aware of the lack of samples in the current SDK and will be improving that over time.