Authors: GGarza

Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips

Voice Control. That’s what the talk is about. Apple has it on their iPhone, but Microsoft introduced it over a year ago. Apple’s version is Siri.

Siri

Voice Control on iPhone 4S, via Siri, lets you use your voice to send messages, schedule meetings, and above all place phone calls. It is sophisticated enough so that if you use your voice to ask Siri to do things, just by talking the way you talk, Siri understands what you say. It knows what you mean, and it can even talk back. This is another iPhone feature that makes it a selling point.

Microsoft’s Voice Control
The thing is, that Microsoft has had the same feature on its Windows Phone 7. For at least a year.  Here are some of its better known features.

You can begin voice control with a lick and hold the Start button of the phone. When the application opens it will start listening for a voice command.

Call Contact Name is one of the commands used often with the Speech recognition features used by callers.  The “contact name” is the name of a person listed in the phone’s phonebook. If the person’s contact card includes more than one phone number, then you will get an option to choose which one you want to call.

Call Phone Number  Ok, contact name is one way to call, but users can also call someone by their phone number. This is handy if they don’t have it stored in the phone’s contact list. All you need to say is say “Call phone number”, after the Speech app opens. The  “phone number” is the phone number that you wish to call.

Find Search Term is another frequently used voice command. Here “search term” is the term that a user wants to search the web with. Remember, that searches here occur using the Bing engine and Bing maps. However, note that the Speech for searching the web feature may not be available in all countries and regions.

Open Application greatly reduces the time one needs to open a certain app such as Calendar, Maps or Music.

Marketing

While Microsoft certainly has the technology in place, why is it that users oh and ah over Apple’s voice control? This is so last year. Well that has a lot to do with marketing. Apparently, Microsoft still hasn’t convinced enough of the public that it is in the mobile phone business. This is apparent because after more than a year in the market, the Windows Phone 7 has yet to make a significant dent…let me correct that. It has yet to make a dent.

Obviously the Steve Jobs legacy lives on.  And in this case, the big problem for Microsoft is that it is seen as a business computing company, not an innovative device company. Being a great business computer company is something that many businesses  would dearly love to have. But innovation? Microsoft is always a step or more behind.

This is unfair considering how much they have done to push computer systems where they have never gone before.

Innovations

Microsoft needs to do a better job of showing the public what it’s software can do. For instance:

• Computers can learn to adapt to user behavior and to anticipate human needs and preferences.
• E-mail services can delete as much as 90 percent of spam before it hits users’ inboxes.
• Computers automatically can reconstruct a 3-D image from a collection of 2-D photos.
• Hours of digital home movies can be edited quickly and easily into professional-looking episodes
• Internet searches provide answers to questions, not just links to Web sites.
• VirtualWiFi software in Windows 7 allows users to connect to multiple wireless networks at the same time.
• Medical researchers are using computational biology tools and high-performance computing to accelerate their work to develop effective vaccines for complex infections and diseases.
• Programmers have tools that enable them to ensure the accuracy and enhance the security of the millions of lines of code.
• Databases can employ probability and pattern detection to help retailers identify customer preferences and sales trends.
• Users can take a break from typing and instead use speech, touch, or handwriting in digital ink.

The Innovation is there…now it’s time for marketing to get going.

Microsoft Research

 Microsoft

 Zdnet

Voice Control on Windows Phone 7 and other Microsoft Innovations is a post from Windows 7 News & Tips - Latest Microsoft Windows 7 News, Tips, Themes, Wallpapers & Guides. Visit Windows 7 News & Tips for the Latest Microsoft Windows 7 News, Tips, Themes, Wallpapers & Guides.

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