THE FUTURE IS HERE

Windows Vista speech recognition – the whole story

While I don’t particularly like Microsoft, and found the Vista speech recognition gone wrong clip a good joke, several Microsoft blogger pointed out the that it was a case of selective media editing. I was interested in getting the whole story so I downloaded the 70mb MSFT Financial Analyst Meeting 2006: Steve Ballmer clip from here http://www.microsoft.com/msft/speech/FY06/BallmerFAM2006.mspx

Knowing there were probably others who wanted to see it but didn’t wish to retrive the whole file, I cut it to show the entire speech recognition part. If you haven’t yet seen the CNBC selectively edited clip, I suggest you watch it here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y_Jp6PxsSQ Having seen this, while I still find the original clip funny, it’s clear the bigger joke is on CNBC for their selective, misleading editing and (rather silly as well) commentary…

The issues and reasons for the failure are discussed here
http://blogs.msdn.com/sprague/archive/2006/07/27/680749.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/robch/archive/2006/07/28/681467.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2006/07/31/684327.aspx
http://blogs.3sharp.com/Blog/dougv/archive/2006/08/01/1672.aspx

I’m not 100% sure on the copyright status, I hope that since Microsoft makes the entire clip available on their website and the CNBC selectively edited/misleading clip is available, they won’t mind. If they do, tell me and I will remove it ASAP.

N.B. As I hope I made clear above. I am NOT associated in any way shape or form with Microsoft, so please don’t accuse me of being so