Microsoft Windows Vista presentation goes awry

arstechnica.com ^ | July 29, 2006 | Matt Mondok

[HAL9000]

Revisiting the Windows 98 days: Microsoft's Vista presentation goes awry

It seems like Microsoft's operating system presentations have a tendency to go awry. In a live product demonstration for a large group of Wall Street analysts, the company decided to show off Windows Vista's speech recognition capabilities. As it turns out, the presentation, known as the Financial Analyst Meeting, was much more of a comedy rather than a professional demo.

Earlier today, the video was available to watch from MSNBC's front page, but it seems to have completely vanished. Luckily, I was able to find a link here. It shows the presenter struggling to get Vista's speech recognition software to cooperate. At one point, the presenter (Shanen Boettcher) said, "select all," and the software showed its violent side, writing "so double the killer delete select all."

The station that ran the clip, OTM, was told that Microsoft was not happy with it airing the video, and the company blamed the problems on ambient noise. As a true slap in the face, the reporter ended the story by saying, "and you were wondering why Vista keeps getting delayed?" Ouch.

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Link to YouTube video

[Echo Talon]

still Beta, not a RC.

[Echo Talon]

Vista Build 5472 preview, Anandtech July 28th, 2006

[sionnsar]

What's funny, to me, is that twenty years ago I remember reading that voice recognition was just around the corner.

I remember a demo of voice recognition ca. 1979. It started out at about 90% accuracy (recognizing *key names* only), but degraded rapidly once it started interpreting the spoken word "backspace" as other keys, adding immensely to the speaker's frustration.

[snowsislander]

This is a demo for a feature of an operating system that is supposed to ship in six months.

I was at a Microsoft presentation recently for a released product and not only did the product crash, it was unkillable even via the Task Manager.

The demonstrator ended up rebooting and starting an entirely different Microsoft product in order to complete the presentation, saying something along the line "Well, this program can do pretty much the same thing..."

[HAL9000]

Current computer architectures are too primitive to do a good job at natural speech recognition. I think it would require organic computing to get it right. But perhaps humanity is better off without that.

[coconutt2000]

Well, not necessarily organic computing per se, but certainly a practical means of modeling data handling on organic processes. In other words, lots and lots of parallel processing power, with the programming designed to mimic our organic brains.

[steve-b]

The station that ran the clip, OTM, was told that Microsoft was not happy with it airing the video

Ya think?

[calljack]

Remember Scotty in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home ? "Computer ... Com-puuu-terrr..."


How come he could type so fast?
He never had to type before.....