Vista speech recognition sounds good to me

In case you didn't hear, the latest Vista speech recognition bombed on the stage.  Lucky for us, Long Zheng had time to do his own demo.  Using an M400 tablet PC and the latest Vista build, Long provides a very impressive demo of speech recognition.  I have to say I'm extremely impressed; not only is the recognition much more accurate, but the usage of speech goes far beyond basic dictation at this point.

This 5 minute video is a must see for you to begin to understand just how far speech recognition has come.  From multi-window and mouse navigation to complete dictation and total control of Windows, Vista's speech technology is already exceeding my expectations.  In fact, I spoke this entire post using the same beta built that Long used. Reads pretty good, no? Plus it was actually quicker to dictate this than type or ink it!

I especially like the way Vista handles a spoken word that appears in multiple places. If you want to correct the word "that", for example and the word "that" is showing in several locations on the screen, Vista covers each instance with a number. Simply speak the number of the word you want to choose and say OK. It's "that" easy.

-kct

Comments

[Carsten]

Somehow I just don't like the idea of "mumbling" to my pc ;-)

And imagine everyone speaking to his/her laptop in a meeting...

[Kevin White]

I don't normally like talking to computers, but I'm also a wannabe writer. I often speak out dialogue or brainstorm out loud, and having my PC write it down would be awesome. It never occurred to me until seeing this. Unfortunately, I use a mac at home.....

[Cody Blotske]

Hey kevin,

Have you put vista back on sammy? Because I'm thinking it would be sweet to have GPS running on a vista breathing Q1 using voice recognition. Just think..... "Sammy I'm LOST!!!! Take me home."

[Kevin C. Tofel]

Cody, have you been reading my Outlook "To Do" list over my shoulder ;) After I saw the speech demo, I immediately added a task to bring Vista back on to one of Sammy's partitions. Too many fun tasks and not enough time....sigh....

[Ctitanic]

I like what I saw in that video and I think that voice recognition is good for some task an on some occasions but I'm disappointed with this implementation in Vista. I saw the demo movie and how this feature miserably failed and in this one I saw the guy repeating over and over some commands because it was not recognized correctly and the video was shot in a quite environment, imagine if you use that in your car, for example, with all the noise around you

[Kevin C. Tofel]

People have to realize a few things about speech recognition. As Frank basically says, there's a time and place for it. Meaning: you have to be in the right environment and have a good mic. As far as the demo video, keep in mind that Long Zheng only went through the basic 5 minute training session; speech recognition becomes more accurate in Vista as you take the additional training sessions AND after additional usage since it learns as you go.