09 February 2007 7 comments Misc. links
This is probably one of the funniest clips I've seen since the last one that made my laugh out loud.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkD90ZV07zo
The guys is trying to write a Perl program in notepad and the Vista voice recognition program is not helping. It's amazing that they guy doesn't give up. In fact it's actually quite impressive how he continues to struggle on. Enjoy!
UPDATE
This clip has been removed from YouTube unfortunately. Does anybody know where else it can be found?
Funny! Why does Microsoft try to develop this? Jakob Nielsen wrote a recent alert box about speech recognition software - he argues that the only reason we persist in developing speech recognition is because we've seen it in the movies and we think it's cool. I agree with him on this one - I remember using speech recognition on the first PowerMac ten years ago, and it was rubbish then. The evidence here is that it is still rubbish! Other interfaces (like mouse, keyboards, even touchscreens) are so much more efficient.
Perhaps if you could use it for limited basic things like controlling iTunes. "Pause!" "Find stairway to heaven" "Next!"
Typing is clearly not working but as you can see in the videoclip working with the popup dialogbox works just fine.
The voice recognition software could apply differently depending on what application is in focus. i.e. when iTunes is the topmost window, "Stop" means stop the song, when Firefox is the topmost window, "Stop" means stop loading the page.
YouTube tells me the video has been removed due to "terms of use violation"... wtf?
ha ha - I guess Microsoft PR people have to earn money like the rest of us...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyLqUf4cdwc
or well, just search "perl vista"
It has been removed - But they put back up all over the place... Oh well, let M$ whine. Meanwhile, you can see another demo of it at work by MS themselves on youtube... (which about the same results.)
He needed to train the recognition engine. You can't expect any speech recognition technology to work out of the box, it requires customization and configuration. Remember, all military aircraft ulitize speech recogniton, just cause the free engine provided for Vista doesn't work so hot (Without training as well), doesn't mean it's a dead technology.