Image courtesy of PocketNow.

When I asked my friend Adam Lein, of Pocket Now, what feature in Windows Phone “Mango” stood out the most to him, he said that speech recognition was the big winner for him. Microsoft apparently concurs with Adam’s opinion because they wrote about this in the official Windows Phone blog and featured Adam’s video demonstration (see below).

Look who’s talking: Speech in Mango

Microsoft calls Mango’s speech recognition feature voice-to-text. It focuses primarly on messaging tasks such as creating or reading text messasges. It can also start an app while in a call and navigate maps. Today’s Windows Phone 7 has a more limited speech recognition feature that lets you voice dial hands free as well as search Bing.

As Adam notes, although Microsoft’s Windows Phone Mango speech recognition is good, it is missing a few integration features that were present in Microsoft Voice Command for the Pocket PC nearly a decade ago (2002-2003). The older speech recognition interface let you ask for calendar information and to give a variety of music playback commands (e.g., “play genre jazz”).


Courtesy of Pocket Now