Chris Henley is a fun and energetic representative of Microsoft. He works on the Developer Platform Evangelist team at Microsoft as an IT Professional Evangelist in the western region and is the co-author of Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Administration Instant Reference from Sybex press. Chris is a regular speaker and presenter at user groups, Technet events, and major conferences around the US.
He has extensive experience in the world of computer networks. He is passionate about the way that technology helps people. He has an entertaining and insightful style of communicating technical information and of making difficult concepts easy to understand. He is an expert in server architecture and network design. He loves to push the envelope of what we think about computers, and what software can do. Chris spends his spare time playing XBOX360 with his wife and kids, fly fishing, camping, hiking, and searching for the best chocolate cake on planet earth.
I have been watching the comments roll in about the Vista Speech Recognition podcast. I would like to spend a couple minutes today answerig some of these.
1. Speech Recognition seems slow to respond in the podcast. What can i do to speed it up on my machine?
The performance of the tool on the podcast is significantly impaired because i was recording the podcast with Camtasia on my laptop. This uses a fair amount of resources and thus impacts the speed of speech recognition. I can tell you from experience that speech recognition is very quick in its responsiveness. I am running build 5270 on an hp nc8000 with a pentium m 2ghz processor with 2 gb of ram. The hard drive is a hitachi 60 gb 7200rpm drive. I am using an external micropone for increased quality. With those specs this tool is a fantastic resource.
2. Microsoft has finally created a tool that apple, dragon, and IBM have had for years.
I smiled when you commented on this. I know speech recognition is not new. It has been around for years. What I love about this tool is that it introduces new improvements that i think will take the technology to the next level. For example the say what you see technology has tremendous potential and just frankly has never been done before.
3. I just dont see when i would use it!
One of my favorite comments came in response to this. Just because it isn't something you would use doesn't eliminate it's value to someone else. I know this tool will not replace the mouse no matter how good it is. People will still type because they like it. The point to this tool is that there are options for those who might not like the current options available for them. It makes the product more accessible.
I love the comments! Keep them coming!