9 insightful thoughts

  1. You may also notice the CPU usage spiking, and undoubtedly, it is because of the numbers.

  2. I think it’s pretty pathetic that the only thing Vista has going for it is some hardware intensive visual effects that add zero functionality, a few stolen “widgets”, and a virgin (i.e. brand new with brand new security chasms) IP stack that’s going to turn vista into nothing more than a pretty screensaver. Leo Laporte has some sobering words to say about it in episode 51 of “Security Now!” (http://www.twit.tv/sn51). Personally, I’ll stick with my MacBook! 🙂

  3. We realize this is slow, and it’s painful to wait for speech to number all the items here.
    BUT, this works really well if you play with the smaller version of Minesweeper (Beginner).
    Plus, you’ll learn something when you do this. Do this:
    Open Minesweeper
    Say Beginner
    Then say Show Numbers
    Pick one, say OK
    then check out the text feedback area in Windows Vista Speech Recognition
    You’ll see that it’ll tell you what to say next time (it actually teaches you to be more efficient at using speech in the future)
    Then, instead of saying show numbers, say row 4 column 6, or some such thing
    And you’ll see that speech is actually quite cool for playing minesweeper.
    Still, there is a major drawback: the columns and rows aren’t numbered, so you have to count them yourself.
    Playing games wasn’t a scenario we really focused on when we created Vista Speech Recognition. For future versions, we’ve added a flag to the system to allow other applications to see that speech is running. These applications can then optimize their functionality for speech. In the case of Minesweeper, this may mean numbering columns and rows when they notice speech is running.

Comments are closed.