Sunday 27 May 2012

Windows 8 with Siri like voice recognition

With the announcement of a release of a beta version for Kinect on Windows 8 in January 2012, experts are expecting Windows 8 to incorporate a voice recognition which will be deeply integrated with the OS.

Speaking to Forbes magazine, Chief Strategy and Research Officer of Microsoft, Craig Munide, stated that Apple’s new voice activated digital assistant Siri is nothing new and that Microsoft has been doing the same for over a year now. Tellme, a Windows 7 Phone feature allows one to send text messages to people and dictate notes. There is also Bing’s voice search engine. Mundie also stated that Siri is so popular mainly because of marketing Apple has given the service and further admitted that the only area Microsoft could try learning from Apple is marketing strategies.

Now that Mundie has put a spotlight on voice activated digital assistants, and in light of the fact that Windows 8 is expected to be released sometime in 2012, anticipation among users is growing because of the wide range of changes announced for the OS. Even more intriguing are Microsoft’s claims of having come up with a voice recognition system even more advanced than Siri. In fact, Microsoft claims to have gone ahead a step and launched a color and gesture recognizing software with the launch of Microsoft Kinect. Kinect recently hit the news with Microsoft’s decision of creating an SDK for Kinect on Windows 8. It also announced that a beta version for Kinect on Windows 8 shall be launched in January 2012.

With the required technology already put together, experts say that it is hard to think of a reason why Microsoft would not incorporate these features. Experts also suggest that it is fairly possible that voice recognition on Windows 8 may be as simple as plugging in a Kinect and giving it instructions, which can extend to dictations, setting reminders, opening applications and websites. Evidence that this is already in the works can be seen in the announcement of Bing Voice coming to Xbox, which is a Kinect dependent feature.

Windows 8 on tablets and computers is expected to be able to deliver an almost similar experience that Siri is now delivering (and even more), but with a supported Kinect system. Even though Windows hasn’t announced voice recognition availability as of now, third party solutions are however eager to make it available soon for Windows 8 with the Kinect SDK. This is expected to boost the market appeal of Windows 8 even more.

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