Windows 8 Bing voice recognition finalWindows 8 will recognize a wider set of spoken commands than Windows 7 will.
Microsoft will be taking this work further with Windows 8, said Ilya Bukshteyn, Tellme Senior Director of Sales and Marketing.
Windows 8 on ARM and Intel slates will be able to recognize many speech commands, which makes sense given they won’t be optimized for keyboard and mouse input.
Because Windows 8 is “HTML-based,” the HMTL5 speech tag could allow developers inside and outside Microsoft to create applications for Windows 8 that are speech-capable, Bukshteyn added.
The Tellme team at Microsoft is really trying to push the envelope on this OS and BING.
Example: Say you want to meet with a friend in New York for dinner next week. Maybe as soon as a couple of years from now, Microsoft officials think you’ll be able to say to your PC “arrange a dinner with Joe in Manhattan on Thursday,” and Tellme will recognize the query, link to your Facebook or LinkedIn social-graph information to discern which “Joe” you’re likely looking to meet, compare your calendars, and use Bing to search for restaurants you both have indicated you “Like” on Facebook.
From a Tellme blog post on August 9, here’s Microsoft’s explanation as to what’s coming with Bing/Tellme/social-graph integration:
“We see a future where the service will know you: know your intent, your social and business connections, your likes and dislikes, your privacy preferences, and the things that define the context that’s important to you. The result will be a speech NUI service that helps you accomplish everyday tasks in a more natural and conversational manner. This service will simplify tasks that used to be tedious or impossible on a TV or other device, by combining an understanding of language and intent with a deep knowledge of you, the user. We envision a future where we build on the experiences we deliver today with Kinect for Xbox 360, Windows Phone, or Bing for iPad or iPhone apps, by enhancing the speech NUI experience to understand more layers of context: what you are doing, where you are doing it, the kinds of devices you are using and your historical preferences. Because this is a cloud-based service, your interactions will be able to persist over time, enabling you to pick up where you left off, regardless of what device you may be using.”
This “understanding intent” work is part of Microsoft’s push to make Bing’s results more personalized, Bukshteyn said. And Tellme is playing a big role here because of the volume of speech data that it is collecting and using to improve the accuracy of its results. Tellme currently is processing 11 billion “utterances” per year, Bukshteyn said.
The integration between Bing and Windows 8 could be really interesting especially if you throw Kinect/Kinect 2 into the mix.
Then you have a context aware platform that doesnt even require you to type.
