Vista booth at Speechtek
Oliver Scholz is lead PM on the team that makes Vista Speech Recognition, and he's been in the booth all day. Here's what he has to say:
What a great 24 hours.
SpeechTek began last night at about 5 pm. We had a lot of traffic at the booth, and we demo’d speech for 2 hours straight. It was a lot of fun. People were super impressed with the breadth of functionality in Windows Speech Recognition. Show Numbers and disambiguation are a total hit!
The coolest part is this though: It just works! And even if it doesn’t work, it still works. The ease of use of Say what you see commanding, and backing off with Show Numbers and Mousegrid impressed people. The fact that it works incredibly well in IE (the machines here have very short scraping times) blows people away. The speed of dictation and ease of correction makes people go “wow!”
Honestly, I am totally impressed with Speech myself. I stand at the booth, and just play with it, until a crowd forms around me and people get excited (see attached photo).
I did things like researching products on the Internet, going to different websites, dictating what I’ve been doing at the show all morning, working people’s names into dictation demos, etc. It’s a total blast.
This morning, Rob gave an awesome presentation at the keynote address. He demo’d speech for about 10 minutes, showing off all the cool stuff. Everything worked great, and people were totally impressed. Most people had seen the FAM clips and didn’t expect anything. When Rob showed how well speech works for dictation, and how easy commanding is, I think people were kind of shocked. He did a great job explaining what happened at the FAM and he as well as Richard Bray (who gave the keynote) poked a little fun at the situation. People really got that it was an audio issue. It was funny, the day before, Nuance had a separate keynote, where they demo’d Dragon 9. They dictated a few sentence, the first one being “Hi Mom, I hope you liked the DVD…” But instead of “Hi Mom” it got “I mom”. So it happens to Nuance, too, although the rest of their demo was nice. Not super impressive though, because the guy who demo’d used the mouse to control the app. They just showed dictation. Rob, in sharp contrast, didn’t touch the keyboard once.
The rest of the day was one big demo fest. Everything went super smoothly, and everybody we demo’d to came away with an understanding that this is really cool stuff, and that Microsoft is super committed to Speech Recognition in Windows.
You should all feel really good about this. Speech Recognition is a total hit!
Thx,
o
