New hope for Windows Phone Voice Control

Today was an exciting day for Windows phone users everywhere. We are now aware that Windows Phone's Tellme feature has been improved to be twice as fast and up to 15% more accurate.

This comes as a bit of a surprise to many, as it was almost certain that despite the great leaps that both Google and Apple are making with their respective voice control systems, and even the fact that Bing is now the default search engine for Siri on iOS, it just seemed like Tellme was the forgotten child of a research team at Microsoft carefully hidden behind a long button press. Of course now we are aware that it is not so and, though it may just be a small team of researchers, there does seem to be somebody at Microsoft working on Tellme.

Many of us long for a true universal voice control mechanism in Windows Phone. Something that perfectly blends real time surfaced information of Google Now, with the helpful automated properties of a digital personal assistant like Siri.

I'm going to tell you that it may already be here.

The windows phones voice application is far from perfect, but in light of today's news it seems that it it's slowly but surely improving with time. At the moment it's already quite powerful, Tellme does Bing searches with great accuracy (and now it's 15% better! :D) but it also does what no other voice control application does on any other platform, because it is able to integrate with the applications already on your phone.

Apps like Voicebutler and Indigo do a great job of this.

They allow you to Call out for the app you want and issue a command. Things like "Butler! When's my next appointment?" and " Indigo, should I bring a coat?" already work through the native interface you get when you hold down the windows logo button on your Windows Phone.

Other applications work like this as well, Yelp, Groupon, Facebook and the list goes on.

As more and more applications are added, more and more take advantage to this system. and It may come a time when all Microsoft has to do to compete with Google Now and Siri, is perfect speech recognition.

What's Next?

Google Now surfaces relevant information to your most recent queries in an attractive card-style presentation, but Windows phone already has a great method of surfacing information from within your applications: Live Tiles. Just as TellMe being able to forward information for applications to then process, I could see the applications themselves using this information to surface relevant statistics and figures based on that information.

For example:

"How did the game end last night" could be forwarded to my ESPN application which would serve up stats and scores, as well as remembering to show a scorecard on the live tile next time my favorite team plays.

All that's left is for Microsoft to perfect its voice recognition algorithms, and work out a method for apps to surface info directly into The TellMe interface a la Siri, and we've got ourselves a winner!!!

pic related. It's a winner



