voice command recognition

i've been playing around with some voice recognition stuff and decided as a test i'd leave my phone on voice announce for a few days to see what it does.  this has helped me learn a bit more about windows mobile 5.0 features, laugh a lot, and learn how voice command/text-to-speech determines certain things.

i'm reminded of the onion's hilarous radio bit about "voice-activated gps system takes top gun soundtrack fan into the danger zone." here it is:

powered by ODEO

pretty funny (at least to me).

here's just some dump of what my experience has been so far with my mobile device..

• i work in the "desert mountain" district and we use DM as an abbreviation -- so my meeting reminder announced that i had a "west region deutsch mark marketing meeting"
• windows mobile 5 default announces email subjects that are marked urgent -- that was cool
• acronyms and abbreviations will never get it right: ASP.NET was recognized as "ASP" (as in asp-en), so it just didn't sound right...maybe there should be an option to announce all caps by letter rather than attempting to make a word out of it?

i also started looking at voice recognition in vista.  it is built-in and pretty interesting.  when you start it up you get a fob at the top of the screen:

when you say "start listening" guess what...it starts listening.  i can then say "start, outlook, new message, to, t-i-m..." you get the picture.  it worked remarkably well (i don't have a benchmark i should admit because i've not used - or had the need to - speech recognition before.  when i don't want it to listen anymore i say "stop listening" and it stops.

i thought it was cool so i started to show my wife.  i had a word doc opened and started speaking...

• "i love you lisa" result: i love you leaf
• "you have a sexy body" result: you have a sexy David

okay, so it needs work :-) -- i think that is because i didn't go through any training exercises that it asked me too -- that and my microphone sucked.  at least that's how i'm justifying it since i don't think david is sexy.  it reminded me of when we bought a popular luxury car (which is subsequently sold after 4 months) that had voice activated navigation.  it sucked.  bad.  i would say "call 555-1234" to dial a number and it would repeat "showing post offices."  the only thing that worked well was telling it the temperature you wanted your air to be.  "find gas stations" resulted one time in "nearby chinese restaurants" -- man it made me angry.

at any rate, check it out if you have vista rc1 installed.