Chad Vavra

Years ago I watched Channel 9 pretty much every week but in the last few I haven’t been that interested in their stuff, mostly because it’s just too long, but somehow I ended up back there today and found this gem.

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=303900

Somewhere in the middle of this epic is a Windows Mobile expense tracker that uses some really amazing speech recognition. It reminds me of how you can use natural typing to add Calendar entries to Google, or Scrybe. The developer demos himself saying “I spent 20 dollars on a taxi” into his expense tracker and it actually translates it perfectly! He goes on to say that this voice recognition is available to any application on the device through APIs that they provide. So if this exists, why isn’t it more prevalent? Maybe, as they mention, you have to speak in the correct format for it to work so well. I don’t think that is much to ask though. Speaking to a computer isn’t the same as speaking to a human. I’m not going to expect a response, or even expect it to translate more than a sentence.

Thinking about this keeps leading me back to the idea that the iPhone changed the way phones are sold and made by dictating to AT&T what they (the service) had to provide to them (the manufacturer), not the other way around as it’s been in the US.

So what we have now, for the best case, is Apple telling users and services what they want, and rightfully expecting everyone to listen and buy it. They are a cult after all. However wouldn’t it be neat to see users dictating what WE want and then an open market of hardware developers creating that for us and the option to pick a service provider that supports it? The Google Android Project might be the best chance of this happening, but there is no reason Microsoft couldn’t do the same. They just need to educate smart phone owners so we know what they can really do so we can demand it from device manufacturers.

But wait, what’s to stop users like me from rolling my own .cab and putting the best software on my unlocked device of choice? That’s right. Nothing. Microsoft really just needs to accept that Android is about to change the market beyond anything they can imagine and use some muscle to get a provider to start selling supporting phones unlocked. They also need to back a portal to software, like Nokia has done with Mosh. Only when they support a community will they have one.

Thanks for clearing that up for me Channel 9.