Vista Voice Recognition gone awry Video

You may know by now that Microsoft has integrated voice recognition technology into the Windows Vista operating system. Microsoft demonstrated the feature on a press conference recently to show attending members of the press and other invited guests how capable Vista was in this regard.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, it all turned out horribly wrong. Even worse, a video of the presentation was uploaded to the Internet for everyone to watch.

A Microsoft employee starts with a basic letter that he wants to sent to his mom, but Vista fails to recognize that and starts to understand dear aunt instead. He then tries to fix the error using voice commands but the program recognize it wrong again and all sorts of nonsense gets added to the sentence.

While it certainly was not funny for the presenter, it was certainly funny for the audience which had a good laugh. Microsoft blamed the issue on the ambient noise, and while it is certainly plausible that it played a role, it should not have gone that wrong in the first place.

The demonstration begins promising, as the first few commands are recognized correctly by Windows Vista's speech recognition system. Things really go downhill when the presenter tries to dictate in Word, as every few words that he speaks are interpreted wrong by the voice recognition software.

Voice recognition has come a long way. Lets take a look at Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 for instance. Keep in mind that the video is from 2010, and an advertisement for the product. It regardless of that is a solid demonstration of what voice recognition software is capable of, and how it can improve your workflow on the computer.

Again, keep in mind that it is an ad. Here is a second video, again from the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Pretty impressive, do not you think. According to the developers, speaking is up to three times faster than writing, and the accuracy of the latest versions of the program is said to be around 99%.

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