Blue : Vista Voice Recognition Podcast

Nice demo, but I'm skeptical.

I've used Dragon NaturallySpeaking for over 10 years for dictation (not for navigating), and I am generally impressed with its accuracy. But where it stumbles, and stumbles badly, is in the correction mechanisms, especially in programs that do not adhere to specific standards. (It does more or less OK in Microsoft Word, but in third-party programs it can be absolutely miserable.) Dragon does not "remember where the cursor is" for more than the very last dictation in some programs. So you cannot go back very far in a paragraph and say "Select something-or-other" and have Dragon expect to find it.

Moreover in some programs when the correction is used, even though the right material is selected, the cursor seems to lose its place and replace the new text but not completely over the old text -- trust me, it makes a mash of things. When correction become such a hassle, ones enthusiasm for the program dies quickly.

Interestingly, one of the best programs to dictate in is WordPad. Dragon never seems to lose its place in that program.

Incidentally, I have dictated this in Dragon, and have only had to go back and make one correction.

# February 28, 2006 1:13 PM

Duck said:

What a great tool for disable people!
Bless!

# February 28, 2006 10:03 PM

Scott said:

Im guessing it would work with media center?

# February 28, 2006 10:28 PM

Johan S said:

Can it be configured to use trigger words .. that is only recognize the trigger word followed by a single command? Can I ask it to read a web page or a particular screen's text area? And/or, can it be configured to only do desktop functions?

# February 28, 2006 10:33 PM

Albert said:

Well, Microsoft is finally catching up.

# February 28, 2006 10:34 PM

walkingmac said:

umm... can't see the vid, but this sounds much like what I already do (and have been doing) with my mac. Only with mac os I have Applescripting that I can 'program' commands to give me a lot more flexibility and versatility. Some of the points and commands mentioned are much more advanced, but keep in mind that speech recognition in the mac has gone pretty much unchanged for about a decade. With M$ releasing this I bet Apple will rekindle their efforts in this technology.

# February 28, 2006 10:53 PM

ylon said:

Yep, still copying features that have been in Mac OS X for a while. Sure, they may enhance things, but its certainly nothing new and nothing that Apple can't enhance very quickly to surpass this.

# February 28, 2006 10:58 PM

NtroP said:

What, you think everyone in the world uses Windows? How about encoding it in something that will play on more than one lame platform? Quicktime/H.264 Maybe?

# February 28, 2006 11:31 PM

Windows Vista (Longhorn) News said:

&ldquo;Watch the podcast and see it for yourself, then try it on your own machine.&rdquo; (Henley)

# March 1, 2006 12:04 AM

Derek W. said:

For all the Mac Zealots complaining, MS had a speech recognition SDK kit out a long time ago. It worked better than what was on Mac OS 8 - MUCH better even back in the day (1996 or 97ish). I hope you Zealots can actually comment on something in life w/o always having to put your Apple comments scattered all over the place, makes it look like your desperate for something (which I don’t know what, but something).

# March 1, 2006 12:06 AM

Mabeshark said:

Cool that it's going to be in Vista for free, no add-on needed, but it's been done? Anyone ever heard of Scansoft - Dragon Naturally Speaking? Nothing really totally new, besides, I don't think Voice recgonition is worth using yet at this point. It's so much faster typing with a keyboard or pointing/clicking with the mouse. I suppose it is a good gesture though as a built-in accessiblilty service, I will give them that. Bravo.

# March 1, 2006 12:25 AM

Make You Go Hmm: » Vista voice recognition instructional video said:

PingBack from http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060301/3007/

# March 1, 2006 1:07 AM

TDavid said:

I wonder how the engine handles people with low raspy voice with weak inflection. My friend is disabled and told me that is his problem with the speech recognition engines he's tried: they don't identify him.

Mr. Henley's voice is pretty clear and the system had trouble recognizing "bill gates" from "build."

# March 1, 2006 1:11 AM

אנקדוטות » התחיל להקשיב said:

PingBack from http://www.anecdotot.net/?p=310

# March 1, 2006 1:24 AM

James Valentine said:

Interesting, but throws up some questions: if you wanted to write 'close that' in a text editor, for example - would you *have* to temporarily disable speech recognition?
It's a fun gummick, but controling the OS with speech commands was patently slower than just clicking around with the mouse - and relatively error prone (viz. having to repeat 'load Office' and 'scroll down' commands, which would just get to be annoying as hell).
It's also fairly slow... after the final demonstration, there was a fair lapse before it parsed the 'stop listening' command, and starting doing all sorts of odd things in the meantime.
It's the sort of auperfluous feature that'll get people all excited in principal, but won't get any use in practise - I can't imagine anyone putting up with the quirks for more than a week after unwrapping.

# March 1, 2006 1:37 AM

Kyle said:

Voice recognition software that's slower than using a keyboard? How unbelievable useless.

# March 1, 2006 2:09 AM

Harish said:

Definitely an overkill! It can be supremely annoying to your the guy who sits at your neighbouring desk as well.

# March 1, 2006 3:45 AM

Clob said:

Its nice and shows good improvements but laks so much that I still would not bother. Untill this technology is perfect and has a "startrek computer" like responce, or at least gets somewhere close, its probably going to be a waste of time. Looks kind of fun to play with for a bit. M$ realy has to keep up on this for it to gather any popularity and I would like to see that.

# March 1, 2006 4:33 AM

Henry Parker said:

Very nice feature indeed. It will be interesting to see it in action

# March 1, 2006 5:34 AM

ElecBoy’s World » Vista Voice Recognition Podcast said:

PingBack from http://www.elecboy.com/?p=80

# March 1, 2006 9:48 AM

Dave’s Dump » Blog Archive » Windows Vista Voice Recognition Video said:

PingBack from http://davemee.com/dump/posts/windows-vista-voice-recognition-video/

# March 1, 2006 9:53 AM

Ian Boardman said:

You could start by calling it SPEECH recognition, not VOICE recognition. It seems as though you you don't even know how to say what you mean.

# March 1, 2006 11:42 AM

Rob Phillips said:

Yeah, it works but it was so slow. Why would I ever use it? It's too complicated to the regular user to learn all the special commands when they can just click with a mouse, and anyone extremely computer savy uses the mouse even less because it is slower than using the keyboard for most repetitive tasks.

# March 1, 2006 1:26 PM

Some Guy said:

Yeah I agree with all of you, im MUCH better at just using my hands, I could care less about this feature, I dunno if I even want Vista, I love XP

# March 1, 2006 3:16 PM

Peter Selie said:

This isn't a podcast, f**king WMV garbage

# March 1, 2006 3:19 PM

Internet Marketing Blog » Windows Vista Integrates Powerful and Practical Voice Recognition said:

PingBack from http://www.theinternetone.net/?p=523

# March 1, 2006 4:30 PM

Rob's Rhapsody : Daily Tech talks about SR in Vista said:

PingBack from http://blogs.msdn.com/robch/archive/2006/03/01/541580.aspx

# March 1, 2006 5:10 PM

Rob's Rhapsody said:

Check it out: http://blogs.technet.com/chenley/archive/2006/02/21/420136.aspx

# March 1, 2006 5:17 PM

Nick said:

How about the following commands (from the desktop):
1. directions to nearest bar.
- of course you would precofigure directions to go to maps.google.com and it would insert "bars near " & your address from your profile.
2. google pictures bill gates
opens firefox and googles
3. edit desktop picture
which would open the current desktop image in your default photo editor.
4. New spreadsheet
Opens xl
5. IM Dude What's up?
Opens IM chat window and sends "What's up" to Dude
6. Play spider.
7. ET Phone Home.
Opens skype and makes a (very) long distance call, temporarily suspending recognition until disconnected.

This would be a truly amazing interface. What was presented here does not appear to hold any real value to the general user.

# March 1, 2006 7:28 PM

Sprague WebLog said:

Chris Henley's blog has a must-see 15-min video of Windows Vista speech recognition in action.&nbsp;...

# March 1, 2006 7:36 PM

Matt said:

WMV PODCAST? that's an interesting concept

# March 1, 2006 8:18 PM

Smartwombat Blog said:

Windows Vista speech recognition screencast.

# March 2, 2006 2:05 AM

Reconnaissance vocale sous Windows Vista - Aqua-Ye Design said:

PingBack from http://aquaye.free.fr/?p=56

# March 2, 2006 4:39 AM

Site d'informations sur <img src="http://www.microsoft.com/emea/images/presscentre/Vista_logo_110_80.jpg"> et "Windows Longhorn Server" said:

Vu sur le blog de Chris Henley
Le lien vers la page avec la vidéo : http://blogs.technet.com/chenley/archive/2006/02/21/420136.asp...

# March 2, 2006 5:11 AM

Bulls23 said:

Can you play back the audio? that is necessary for real dictation/correction. Can you add additional language models or vocabularies such as a medical specialty? Can you have more than one profile such as headset and hands free microphone? What file format is the audio recorded in?

# March 2, 2006 8:16 AM

WOW said:

Mac OS's have ad this feature for about 10 years.

# March 2, 2006 2:26 PM

ChodaBoy said:

Wow! Windows Vista can do the same thing as Dragon Dictate Naturally Speaking...

Only much slower, and with more errors, and YEARS later.

Windows Vista, What a waste of bits.

# March 2, 2006 11:35 PM

Hervé said:

Bonjour,

La reconnaissance vocal serat-elle également multilangage ? Vista reconnaitra le français ?

# March 3, 2006 2:58 AM

Genevieve said:

La reconnaissance vocale doesn't work on Chenley's blog, espece d'idiot.

# March 3, 2006 8:59 AM

Hervé said:

Idiote toi même Genevieve

Je pose une question simple, tu peux répondre simplement, mais t'as étrangement choisi de m'envoyer balader...

Bon si une personne agréable et sensé accepte de me répondre, j'aimerais savoir si Microsoft développe la reconnaissance vocale en française sous Vista.
Merci.

# March 3, 2006 12:52 PM

Harold Wong's Blog Site said:

I'm excited that my team mate, Chris Henley, did a GREAT podcast on the voice recognition capabilities...

# March 3, 2006 2:22 PM

Richard said:

My daughter is paralyzed. Just because this isn't useful to you doesn't make it stupid. I'm amazed at the narrown worldview of some people.

# March 4, 2006 9:06 AM

Brian Groth's Life at Microsoft said:

I can't wait! Chris Henley has a great video showing how voice recognition is built into Windows Vista....

# March 5, 2006 2:41 PM

Brian said:

I want to see more, make another video please!

# March 5, 2006 4:15 PM

blog.deobald.org said:

Allgemeines:

Polizei want vor Würge-Spiel - Letztes Jahr sind 50 Jugendliche daran gestorben, dieses Jahr schon 8&#8230;
Samenspender muss zahlen - Vorsicht beim Samen-Spenden: Ein Schwede muß jetzt für die drei Kinder eines Lesben-Paares

# March 6, 2006 6:31 PM

Toby said:

where is the feature voice recognition in the new build 5308?! who can help me

start -> controlpanel -> ?! there is noch option voice recognition

# March 10, 2006 1:39 PM

Stewed Prunes... said:

When I decided to get all gung-ho on blogging, I did it for all the wrong reasons. There was some perceived...

# March 16, 2006 1:25 PM

1truefan said:

It looks nice - it is nice to see Vista add a feature that has been available on MAC OS X for over a year I think now - can't wait to dual-boot Vista on the iMac!

# March 16, 2006 5:44 PM

Lora Maynor said:

I am impressed. Can this application be used in the healthcare arena? I work with a lot of physicians and healthcare providers. Physicians have to do dictations regarding a patients Operating Reports, Discharge Summaries, History and Physicals etc. Is Vista intuitive to recognize foreign accents? We often times see physicians from all over the world. Most do not have typing skills and would prefer to dictate their reports. Currently, they have to wait for a transcriptionist to type their reports, then they have to review the preliminary reports, make the necessary edits via typing themselves and then sign for a Final Report. Currently many physicians are being trained on an electronic medical record which is the patients chart. I want to know how do they builed the medical library vocabulary? Is this based on "Dragon" technology? What is different about Vista as compared to other Voice Recognition programs? What are the possibilities of interfacing this program with our Electronic Medical Record? Who holds the Market Share in this Industry?, Have you made projections about positioning this product in the voice recognition industry? Is your stock on NYSE or NASDQ?

# March 16, 2006 10:06 PM

ICT en Onderwijs BLOG said:

Via de nieuwsbrief van Camtasia kwam ik bij deze post en screencast van Chris Henley over de spraakherkenningsmogelijkheden in Windows Vista. En als je even om de rare intro en het overdreven entho...

# March 17, 2006 12:01 AM

Nils said:

What is so amazing about Vista? Remember when Windows XP came out? Then voice recognition was all the rave, after it was released no one used it. And also, there are many voice recognition programs out there that work great with any operating system.

If this videocast was released 20 years ago I would have been impressed but other than Vista looking "cool", what is so amazing and fantastic??

# March 17, 2006 3:01 AM

Todd Follansbee said:

What sort of processor were you running this on? Is there hope for faster response tine with larger ram or memory allocation for those of us with modest budgets?

# March 17, 2006 8:45 AM

GCF Men » Blog Archive » Microsoft’s New View On Life said:

PingBack from https://gcfmen.wordpress.com/2006/03/19/microsofts-new-view-on-life/

# March 19, 2006 1:23 PM

Windows Vista Weblog » Vista Voice recognition said:

PingBack from http://www.windowsvistaweblog.com/2006/03/06/vista-voice-recognition/

# March 20, 2006 7:38 PM

MSBLOG said:

PingBack from http://msblog.resdev.net/?p=420

# March 22, 2006 2:03 PM

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