Microsoft Launches Mobile Voice Search Application
Microsoft this week launched Microsoft Recite, a voice search application for Windows mobile devices.
The offering—which Microsoft calls “search technology for your voice”—allows users to capture, search, and retrieve spoken notes and reminders via voice commands.
“The idea behind Recite was to help make a busy mobile lifestyle easier by providing [users] an easy method for remembering, searching, and retrieving mental notes and reminders from their mobile phones using the sound of their voice—without navigating menus or tapping out text,” writes Stathis Papaefstathiou, product unit manager at Microsoft, in an email to Speech Technology. “Just speak your mental note to store it and later, when you need the information, just search and retrieve the remembrance using your voice.”
Microsoft Recite can store hundreds of spoken notes and uses voice pattern matching, which is based on speaker inflection, to analyze speech and search recordings.
“[Voice pattern matching] is different from speech recognition, which has to accurately convert spoken words to application-readable input,” Papaefstathiou writes. “With Recite you can store hundreds of spoken notes, and then later retrieve the notes you want based on a match with your search terms.”
According to Papaefstathiou, a user simply presses “Remember” on her mobile device, records a message, and then presses “Finished” to complete the recording and store the note. To retrieve a stored note, a user presses “Search” and speaks her search.
“There are countless ways that people might use Microsoft Recite,” Papaefstathiou writes. “To record a shopping list, friends’ birthdays, addresses, school happenings, gift ideas, books to read, favorite wines…Recite even lets people remember and search in multiple languages.”
A free preview download of Recite is available from Microsoft for some cell phone models.
“The feedback we’ve received on the technology preview has been great,” Papaefstathiou writes. “People have mentioned they find Recite useful.”