Windows Vista Speech Recognition. I saw a demo video earlier from Channel9 I think… but this is a better example. It gets the Aussie’s accent dead on, first time around. I wonder how much training it needs beforehand. It really shows you how far research has gone in this area.
If you notice, you’ll see that there’s actually some artificial intelligence going on in the background to figure out some of the stuff he’s saying. It’s not all preset words/phrases; he’s actually talking to the computer, almost like it’s another human.
It’s crazy how he’s able to navigate Internet Explorer so easily with voice too. I have no idea how it’s able to resolve the speech-to-text so fast and do a grep on the entire document. It must be doing some kind of optimized caching of the link names when the page loads.
There are a lot of people in this world who haven’t even had the chance to interact with all of our high-tech devices and culture simply because of loss of arms, paralysis, or blindness. Can you imagine what their world is like when everyone around them is talking about iPods and the cool new application from Google or Apple? Your OS could have the nicest, snazziest effects, transparency, icons, whatever, but if it can’t be used by people with disabilities, that’s a shame. It’s nice to see that Vista will have this.
