Recite on Windows Mobile

Sometimes the best speech apps don’t really use speech recognition at all. I mean, yeah, there’s an audio stream and yeah there’s some processing, but you don’t always need the computer to understand what was said in order for it to be useful.

My favorite new example is Microsoft Recite, a technology preview from another sister team (like the cool Tag app that I mentioned previously).

I downloaded it over the air (it’s free) and had it running on my AT&T Tilt phone within a few minutes.  After that, I just select “remember” and speak something that I want to remember later.

Once it’s been recorded, you select ‘search’ to find the note and play it back.

For example, I don’t have a pen handy right now but I wanted to remember a few things to pick up the next time I’m shopping at Target.  Later, when I get to the store, I’ll just select ‘search’ and say “target” – the Recite software will pull up the note that I previously recorded.

It’s a simple trick for SR: rather than have the software analyze everything and provide perfect recognition, the system does a simple pattern matching – a process that’s much more robust. 

As a bonus, it works in any language and with any speaker. Look at this short 90-sec demo to get the idea: