A couple of weeks back Microsoft organised a special event just for its employees. Various upcoming technologies were demonstrated at this event. A video demo of the Bing prototype app for Windows Phone 8 was leaked and it reveals the powerful speech recognition feature that future devices may have. Speech recognition has been there by default on the Windows Phone platform from its early days, though the video reveals that Microsoft has polished this feature quite a lot.
The Bing prototype app has a better word error rate reduction that its predecessors. Latency for speech requests has also been greatly reduced. The app handles speech requests in noisy situations considerably better. Another 10-15% percent reduction in word error rate is also on the cards. Then there’s the new streaming mode, which will allow users to search as they speak. The leaked video doesn’t reveal when this Bing prototype app will actually be finalized so that it can be rolled out to users. All of this may just be one internal research project. Will we see all of these features in the Windows Phone Blue update or will we have to wait until Windows Phone 9 drops? Only time will tell.
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