Newsmaker: Gates still finding his voice

SAN FRANCISCO--Bill Gates has been saying for years that one day soon we will use handwriting, voice and touch to control our computers.

He's still saying that. In an interview with CNET News.com, Gates talks about some of the ways that speech recognition has already made inroads and discusses some of the places it will eventually go.

Following the launch of Microsoft's new corporate telephony software, Gates discussed how come the business phone remained the same for so long and how much it can change once it is made part of the same network as the PC. Gates also talked about the possibilities of touch-screen computing, noting how popular the idea of multitouch has been, both on Microsoft's tabletop computer, Surface, and on the iPhone.

Although he plans to shift to part-time work at Microsoft next year, Gates has said he will keep a few key projects under his purview and suggested the natural language interface push is one he'll probably keep working on. Search and the future of Office are also on the short list.

Q: When did you really first see the possibilities of voice? Was there a real early demo you saw years ago that sort of--you saw it and could really see the possibilities?
Gates: Well, certainly the idea that computers should deal with voice has been around a long time. It's kind of a natural way to communicate. In the 1970s, DARPA was funding people, including people at Harvard, to do speech recognition. And so people kind of thought, hey, this should be easy to do. The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one and the same goes way back as well.

The dream of computers understanding voice goes way back. And the dream that the data network and the voice network would be one and the same goes way back as well.

Microsoft early on took it that, hey, the magic of software would come to bear on both--not just data networks, but also voice networks and video networks, and we got very involved in that. The real surprise to us, frankly, was that because that world was essentially satisfactory, people were so unwilling to take a risk to move, particularly (moving) business phone calls over onto a new platform.

These PBXs (the private branch exchange systems businesses use to manage phone calls) that are really--they're just computers--have existed alongside the normal infrastructure. Their wiring has stayed there, their directory, their server piece. And so we've been patiently sort of investing in this. In fact, in 1999 we got our first large-scale voice, PBX-type work under way.

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And so I assume at that point you thought it was going to happen sooner?
Gates: As we take the magic of software to new things, it's OK to be too early. We don't want to be in too late. And so we saw that the pieces were starting to come together. And so it made sense for us to invest. We wanted to be there, particularly as Exchange and Outlook and Office had gotten so strong, you know, people used us to do everything but the telephony piece. The idea that, OK, now we should encompass telephony and do that kind of sat there as a clear, big opportunity for us.

The thing that's happened over the last eight years is this willingness that we now have enough customers who have had very good experiences using Internet transport, bringing the PC into the picture.

With speech recognition, one of the ideas is that there are some applications where it can pay off, even if it is not getting 100 percent recognition. Is finding some of those areas one of the keys to speech recognition being mainstream?
Gates: That's right. Remember, the stuff we're doing with unified communications, speech recognition is not actually a very key element of what goes on. There are some aspects of it. For example, when you're doing audio conferencing in our world, we can tell you who's speaking. And that's very frustrating today in traditional audio conferencing that you don't know who's come and gone, and somebody can speak up and you don't know who that is.

Or with RoundTable (Microsoft's 360-degree video conferencing camera), we use video and audio clues to tell who's speaking and bringing the focus on that. And you always have the full room view at the bottom, but you have that zoomed-in view as well. And so, you know, if it gets it slightly wrong, you can look at the full-room view and see exactly what's going on. And just like if the cameraman was focusing on something different you were interested in, well, the wide view takes care of that.

When you want to search something (in a meeting) if a word sounds like one of three things, for the search case, you can just index all three. And the fact that you might get some false positives, that is, when you do a search, you might get some part of the speech where a similar sounding word was being used, it's not that big a deal. You'll just look at it, skip past it. And so not being perfect is not a huge problem.

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[yacahuma]

Mr Gates

Mr Gates, Microsoft is no longer a software company but a marketing one. By building 5(are there more) of the new OS, that doesnt really do anything new, it shows that a marketing person not a software person is in charge of Microsoft. Only a sales person will be STUPID enough to come up with that idea. Please STOP pretending Microsoft is a software company. MS lost its MOJO a long time ago.

[rthutchison]

Dude

you are making no sense

[Lee in San Diego]

Not yet?

His voice still hasn't changed! Might explain why he doesn't have a
beard

[FO-FI_FO_454]

HOWEVER, THIS SHALL BE THE FUTURE OF CORPORATE TELEPHONY.

Bill Gates is right, right on target, however, being a Proper Gentleman, a Worldly Man, a husband, a parent and loving son, this is what he is NOT telling you. How do I know all of this, well, I've been there, done that, and my favorite tune is from "Fiddler on the Roof" - Tevya (portrayed by Zero Mostel) sings "If I Was A Rich Man - deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle deedle doooooo!" Let's get rolling with this preview of Voice Recognition, as it might be employed 20 years (or sooner if censorship rules are relaxed) from now.

But wait - do I like voice recognizion? I LOVE IT! Why? Like Rex Harrison's character (the speech therapist) and Audrey Hepburn's character (the street urchin....GO WANNNNNNNNNN)in one of my top 10 all time MUST SEE movies (available on DVD....SEARCH IT, GO WANNNNNNNN do some work)I now speak "PROPERLY" when addressing my AT&T Telephone device. With a pronounced NEW YAWK accent, coupled with my Brooklynese upbringing, I speak today at age 73 just like I used to speak when I was 23 years old. BUT WAIT - with Voice Recognition, I speak PROPERLY to the voice in the device that TALKS TO ME, PROPERLY. The end result is that when I'm done with Telephony Voice Recognition sessions, my neighbors don't understand me....after all, I'm now, A PROPER MAN. I dig it - it's as though I've been taken back to my childhood, Public School, and am being taught all over again, HOW TO SPEAK CLEARLY AND DISTINCTLY in my preferred language which is English. Abd then, I change my colostomy bag - what is eally important today, my LIFE or learning how to speak all over again?

It's a cool way to reduce administrative costs, add functionality to a telephone without the risk of the caller or recipient of the call "LOSING IT - GOING PHCUCKING NUTS and SCREAMING.

Some negative comments: For those of you that are afflicted with a Cleft Pallet, or LISP, voice recognition PSUCKS (the P is (p)silent)....think about that for a while. For those of you that just had a tooth pulled, root canal, and have a mouth full of cotton balls, and MUST CALL YOUR BANK - get a stooge to do it for you, because ain't no way voice recognition is going to help you. Can you understand - you must speak PROPERLY to a ROBOT, unless you are in the year 2027 or sooner when we will have these options:
1. The Howard Stern Voice Recognition Telephone system. Say whatever the PHCUCK you want - and you have the option of selecting a Voice Recognition genre, so taht the Robot talks back to you the way you prefer to be spoken to...undertand.
2. The Penthouse Voice Recognition Telephone system. I'm not referring to Donald Trump's PENTHOUSE but rather to a gentleman who has the first name Larry....his last name rhyme's with Clint.
3. With the influx of more cross border and foreign visitors to this nation, Voice Recognition Telephony will offer a wide variety of languages. Think about that for a moment - there's an emergency, you have to make a phone call, in ENGLISH, the robot answers and goes through the drill, offers you 200 languages, plus dialects to select before you can shout "FIRE FIRE FIRE - HELP HELP HELP - NOW NOW NOW."

Yes indeed, proper people must portray themselves at all times as being PROPER....just like Rex Harrison in that infamous ALL TIME GREAT MOVIE with Audrey Hepburn. Personally, I'm a PROPER PERSON TOO, just like Tevya, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Joey Bishop, Buddy Hackett, Milton Berle, and Howard Stern.....we tell it like it is, PROPERLY, but also funnier.

Thank you for this opportunity to Talkback, and have a wonderful weekend.

[matthewcsims]

I don't know about that.

Some customer service centers, like my cell phone company, already have voice recognition software, and I don?t like using it. It is not because it doesn?t work. It usually works fine for me, but it is not human. I don?t mind talking to a human like a human. It does make me uncomfortable talking to a computer as if it were human. I don?t know why, it just does. Some people have conversations with their plants. I talk to my dog. Don?t make me talk to your fichus, and I won?t make you talk to my dog, I guess.

But in my house, voice recognition is going nowhere. When I bring home my new computer, with that spiffy voice recognition software, my girlfriend and I will use it for about 20 minutes, talking about how cool it is. Then she will say, ?Ok, I?m going to watch TV now.? Ok, I will just play on the net. About five minutes of me voicing out every Google request my girlfriend says, ?Hey I am trying to watch TV!!! Why don?t you shut the?.? Know what I mean?

Just imagine what it would sound like in an office.

Then there are the inherent security implications for people that will voice out their email password to their laptop while out in public. But invention never really stops to think I guess.

I also don?t want computerized walls or screens all over. Like refrigerators with web browsers built in. I am sorry, but I just don?t get that.

[zgreenwell]

Sounds like they're on target

Simplifying the user interface to something that is more practical sounds great. I personally would love to see a greater implementation of speech recognition and touch controls. Also, "cloud computing" is a great thing that I hope gets developed more too. It would be great if cell phone companies would jump on the and back up my contacts "in the clouds". That way if I lost my phone I could still get the information. I feel the same way about computer back ups. There is no reason why I can't do that now.

[JRFeeney]

Yeah, right.

If Microsoft is in charge of the computing community, we will never get there. Oh, it will look pretty and have all kinds of feel good bells and whistles but it will amount to a POS.