Vista speech demo failure

Okay, okay, so we screw up sometimes too.  Like I said yesterday, it's easy to laugh at the people who do these things, but sometimes it happens.  Demonstrating speech is much harder than using it.

I don't know much about this particular incident.  My team is often asked to do Vista demos (I show it off to somebody on my Tablet just about every day), and yes, sometimes the speech recognition fails.  Heck, if it were perfect right now we would ship it!  It's too bad we don't make the news for the thousands of demos we do that work flawlessly.

Speech demos in front of a large audience are particularly tricky because the acoustics change from when you did your rehearsal (in an empty room) to when it's showtime (lots of people).  There are plenty of ways to make up for that, of course and the best way is to have a good close-talk microphone.  But even then, sigh, something can happen.

Published 27 July 06 02:21 by sprague

Comments

# Rob's Rhapsody said on July 28, 2006 9:56 AM:
Yesterday I had the day off. I went to the Woodland park Zoo with my son, Nicholas, with his summer camp....
# Richard Sprague WebLog said on July 29, 2006 1:24 AM:
Everyone wants to know why the Financial Analysts Meeting SR demo failed, especially now that Jim...
# Tobias said on August 1, 2006 3:37 AM:
"Speech demos in front of a large audience are particularly tricky because the acoustics change..."
Yes of course! That's commonly known, and many presentations in the past have failed due to this. So why does it happen again and again? I would expect more professionalism. Someone at Microsoft must have known that this can happen. This kind of bad news again impacts the whole industry.
# sprague said on August 1, 2006 2:41 PM:
Yes, yes. Mea Culpa. Since it affects the whole industry, I wonder if there's something the industry can do about it. It's particularly frustrating because failures are so hiliarious that they stick in the public's mind much longer than the thousands of similar demos that go perfectly.
# VanBenthuysen on Office said on August 2, 2006 6:43 PM:
# furroy said on August 3, 2006 10:39 PM:
my application is going to bomb if this isn't flawless in vista!! *crosses fingers*
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