Me: What time is it?
She: It’s 10:48 pm
Me: What day is it?
She: The date is Tuesday, December fifth two thousand and six.
Me: When is my next appointment?
She: Tomorrow at 4:30 pm in 2260 USB
Me: Play music
She: Do you want to listen by genre, album, artist or anything?
Me: Artist
She: Do you want to listen to U2, Phil Collins, Collective Soul, …
Me (interrupting): U2
She: Playing U2 … (Windows Media Player opens up and Zooropa starts)
Me: I think I am falling in love with you!
She: Please repeat!
Me: I said I think I am falling in love with you!
She: Please repeat!
End of converstation.
I had the above conversation with my phone after installing Microsoft Voice Command on it. It really is one of the most amazing voice command softwares I have seen. It’s a good example of the serious research microsoft has been doing in “speaker-independant voice recognition”. You do not need to train this software, just speak to it in natural english and it works fine (if she can understand my Indian accent, I think she is pretty good).
Oh yes, I call the software a “she”. I just can not bring myself to calling her an “it”. Examples of other things I can ask her to do:
“What is my schedule for today”, “Change profile to silent”, “Turn off all reminders”, “call john at work”, “start calculator” etc. She even reads out the contents of emails that I receive. This software is a good reminder of the fact that we really are getting somewhere with digital assistant technology. I would really recommend watching the demo video to get a sense of what it really feels like.
