When good demos go (very, very) bad - Reuters Newsblogs

 Not ready for prime time, at least not at the front of crowded rooms:

At Micrsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday, Vista product manager Shanen Boettcher set out to show just how easy to use the speech recognition technology built into upcoming Windows Vista software will be. Like, for example, dictating aloud a simple, hearfelt letter to mom, and having one’s voice automatically transcribed into a computer.

The result was a disaster.

There's an excellent speech recognition-related reality-check interview with Jordan Cohen in the latest issue of ACM Queue, but it's only in the print version of the pub at this point, not posted on the ACM Queue web site yet -- go figure...  I'll post a reference to the interview when it's published on the site.

Source: When good demos go (very, very) bad - Reuters Newsblogs