Comments on: MSNBC deceived the public: Vista’s speech recognition demo

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 12:16:51 +0000

Unfortunately integration into windows usually means less competition and therefore less improvement. If windows would offer a good interface for programs to take advantage of then third parties could easily develop programs to take advantage from that interface. Microsoft could of course also offer a product of its own, but integration into windows is usually killing for competition (e.g. media player and internet explorer).

Yes, speech recognition is good for a lot of people (without it I couldn’t work), but please no integration… Will I be able to use a competitive product in the future that in some aspect is better for me? Who can give me that guarantee? Perhaps dragon naturally speaking will die because of this… but at the moment it works better for me than windows!

On Linux developers create interfaces too, giving us, the consumers, much more freedom of choice. I hope a competition authority will prevent overintegration (I’d prefer to install a program separately once to having no – realistic – choice).

By the way, I donate speech to the VoxForge-project (www.voxforge.org) to enable more competition in this area and I encourage everyone who wants to see more progress in this area to do so too.

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 12:49:28 +0000

What a bunch of pseudo ‘experts’! Spelt? News altering/making media pukes, is more the norm than the exception! Lorelei, you were right on target with your comment. I’ve been involved with computing technology since the 1960’s, wrote my first program in 1K of memory. I did extensive work in the area of AI and heurististics. Microsoft was a prime competitor of my former employer but I applaud their effort in making accessability a part of their computing platform. Don’t sweat the small stuff, millions of people are still in the technological stone age.

By: Lorelei

Lorelei — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 20:15:37 +0000

Looking at the big picture… in the final years of his life, my father had Parkinsons Disease and was dependent on ‘Dragon Naturally Speaking’. Since he was disabled it was always an inconvenient task to have Dragon be a separate program to install on his PC etc. Microsoft “needs” to work on this path because it will benefit so many disabled people in the future once voice recog is fully integrated into Windows. Even if only HALF the demonstration had worked, my father STILL would have been excited and happy about this demo.

By: Stemmegjenkjenning i Vista - funker det? @ teknotum

Stemmegjenkjenning i Vista - funker det? @ teknotum — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 16:10:34 +0000

[...] Det er i motsetning til en gjennomgang av MSNBC – som var et så selektivt utvalg av en test at en blogger bestemte seg for å gjøre sin egen. [...]

By: Robert D

Robert D — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 10:03:07 +0000

I think most of us tried Speech to Text at least once
I trained my PC to recognized my voice (reading hours of famous phrases).
Although about as similar as the demo it will be awhile before speech-to-text becomes truely up to speed. Put it this way, take “any” speech-to-text dictation software and turn it on, then call someone on your cell phone and talk naturally to where your PC can hear you.
What you said on the cell and what the PC interpreted are probably 2 totally different things

I wanted to do dictation like that demo – but realized that
Dear Mom,
We hope you like the DVD
We miss you
Shanen

…takes about 3 minutes where as typing take about 6 seconds

and god forbid you get a cold…
CUT and UP sound alike to the computer
Cool technology but still in infancy stage….well I guess I am comparing it to Star Trek to where you walk in your house and say “Computer…Status report” and then you hear “You have 9 email messages 6 appear to be junk mail, The episode of Simpsons where Homer is on “the Island” is on at 6:30 pm tonight, several updates to installed programs are available but not installed by your request, and there was several power fluctuations reported by your UPS’s which coincide with the weather report of thundershowers this afternoon”

By: ikyouCrow

ikyouCrow — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 11:30:14 +0000

@Leo – his name is spelt just the way the engine spelt it.

By: Hoopskier

Hoopskier — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 04:27:07 +0000

@Leo: “he said “Shannon”, it wrote “Shanen””

Actually, that’s how the guy doing the demo spells his name.

By: theone

theone — Fri, 11 Aug 2006 22:47:04 +0000

why is this coming out now, all this was avalabul 3 years ago with Dragon Naturally Speaking, all the same things, this is just a copy of it

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 03:57:21 +0000

no offence… but who runs a new product demo to financial analysts none the less without a dry run making sure everything works 100%. You can’t blame the equipement… you have to blame the operator.

oh, shouldn’t using a newer build actaully work better than an older build? And how can the input gain be screwed up on a new install? I hope Microsoft doesn’t have all volumes levels set to maximum by default.

By: Microsoft Speech insider

Microsoft Speech insider — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 23:52:22 +0000

Fact from a Microsoft insider: The real screwed up was that we used a newser build for that demo and the gain on the input was screwed up. You can see that on the screen the red button is constantly lighted. So basically that poor Vista machine must have felt like being blasted by a 1Kw loud speaker at one foot range, thus couldn’t make up what was being said

- A Mac loving Microsoft employee