Dialogue Box 7: Giving Vista a fair hearing

Summary: If computers are so smart, how come they don't understand a word we say? That's perhaps unfair — but, as Dialogue Box found out, even the state-of-the-art speech recognition in Windows Vista has its problems

By Rupert Goodwins and Charles McLellan | July 9, 2007 -- 11:38 GMT (04:38 PDT)

Follow @rupertg Follow @charlesmclellan

We trained it. We fine-tuned it. We even tried reading poetry to it. But when the crunch came, did we find Vista's voice recognition listened up? You'll have to watch to find out...

Topic: After Hours

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Talkback

1 comment

Log in or register to join the discussion

Training

You weren't _particularly fair_ with regards to the training element...your witty comments in between each phrase, whilst hilarious, were indeed picked up by the microphone. One whole passage (at 5:20 remaining) was accepted even though you were just talking about the training you had completed. Furthermore, you were speaking in a specific style...most speech recognition programs tell you to speak in your most natural voice as it helps with recognition. Also you say "if you can stand to sit at your computer for half and hour doing this"...it's a cost/benefit thing. Half an hour of chatting rubbish, but for the rest of your computer use you can be a lazy gimboid...I think it's worth it...

Anyway, only just discovered the show, enjoy it a great deal, keep it up guys!

hullo-83a60

12 July, 2007 19:37

Reply Vote