Another Microsoft Blunder

Apparently when displaying their new voice recognition software that’s coming with Vista (accessibility application), everything goes wrong again.

Here’s the video of what happened: Windows Vista Speech Recognition Demo Gone Awry (MSN Video link)

According to Rob Chambers, the reason for the demo failure was because:

As I posted yesterday, I got a chance to check out the machine that Shanen used for the Financial Analysts Meeting demo. I confirmed that it was just what I suspected: An audio gain issue.

If you watch the video clip on MSN Video you can see in the speech user interface that the microphone “volume” is very high. It pushes up into the red frequently while Shanen is speaking to the computer. That’s caused by the fact that the audio sub-system wasn’t respecting the audio gain settings we’ve asked it to use.

This is a known bug in current builds, and has already been fixed by the audio team in their private builds in preparation for RTM.

Here’s the transcript (from /.):

Microsoftie says this
Speech recogniser hears types this

Dear mom
comma
Dear aunt,

[laughter]

Fix aunt
Let’s set

Delete that
Delete that
Delete that
so

I think it’s picking up a little bit of echo here
Delete… select all
double the killer delete select all

[laughter]

Final Text: Dear aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all

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Random Crap:

Female impersonation tarts up online games (from /.) – Kathryn Wright, WomenGamers.com’s consulting psychologist, earlier this decade found that 60 percent of male players who don female avatars, or on-screen personas, do it to gain an advantage in game play. An enthusiast with the online handle Jackpot649 nailed the zeitgeist in his response to the About.com query: “I’m a guy, but if I gotta look at an avatar all day, I’d sooner look at a female avatar. Plus, people give you more free stuff.”

Naked women leave police speechless – “Police only watched … they could not approach the tourists because they spoke no English,” a local newspaper in the southern Albania coastal town of Sarande said. Haha! What an awesome excuse. I don’t know about you, but doing charades or pictionary could’ve easily gotten message across that they couldn’t be topless. But can’t speak English, I’ve got to remember that one for when I get ‘in trouble’.

Giant dead eel tossing contest canceled – For more than 30 years, crowds have flocked to the small English fishing village of Lyme Regis to watch an annual tradition — two teams of fishermen standing on wooden platforms as human bowling pins, hurling a dead giant eel at each other. But the ritual was abruptly abandoned after an animal rights activist threatened to draw negative publicity to the latest tournament, organizers said Saturday. The practice, known as conger cuddling, is the annual highlight in the small coastal town about 155 miles southwest of London. The object of the game is to knock the opposing team off the platform by swinging a 25-pound eel at them. That sounds like such an awesome game!

Police arrested over sweets theft – The confectionery at Hailsham Police Station in Sussex operates on an honour system and officers help themselves to candy and drinks before leaving money in a tin. Maybe they should’ve implemented the ‘eye system‘ (from my previous entry).

Woman in doghouse over Jehovah’s Witness sign – A British woman has been ordered by police to take down a sign on her garden gate which read “Our dogs are fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Such an awesome sign. Sucks that she took it down. Maybe she could put up a new sign that says: Our dogs were fed on Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D (from Ars) – Photo Tourism is a system for browsing large collections of photographs in 3D. Our approach takes as input large collections of images from either personal photo collections or Internet photo sharing sites, and automatically computes each photo’s viewpoint and a sparse 3D model of the scene. Our photo explorer interface enables the viewer to interactively move about the 3D space by seamlessly transitioning between photographs, based on user control. Looks neat!