It seems that Microsoft wanted to demonstrate how the new Vista was so advanced. So it did a demo of some voice recognition software, new to Vista. But being true to the Windows world, it failed miserably. It rarely got anything correct, and at times came up with some humorous results. It had the audience in stitches. Probably not what MS was hoping for. It sounds similar to the grammer/spelling/punctuation correcter in Word. How it knows what you meant and "fixes" it for you.
Actually Apple had a similar problem with the release of the Newton. The handwriting recognition was far ahead of its time but still not reliable enough for prime time. Of course this was while Jobs was not with the company. He would have never gone through with something which was so flawed.
I'm not sure why MS does this type of risky demo when the potential bad publicity would be far more harmful than the good publicity if it actually worked. Anyway it did amuse his audience, maybe that was the goal.
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2 comments:
Stitch,
That is indeed weird of MS to do! What were they thinking? And, why are they having so much trouble? For gosh sakes, Acura has had good voice recognition in their cars for the navigation system for some years now.
I am sure someone got their ass kicked for going forward with the demo, when it was obviously not ready.
-Le
But you know, gentlemen, I don't think Microsoft suffers much if at all when a demo goes awry. As THE OS provider for business enterprise, I don't think customers seriously consider doing anything about it. I just don't think MS has much to lose.
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