That’s what Windows Vista thought product manager Shanen Boettcher said: “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” What he DID say was “Dear mom”. Reuters has the story:
Several tries at making the computer understand the simple salutation “Dear Mom” was read by Microsoft software as “Dear Aunt, let’s set so double the killer delete select all.” Attempts to correct or undo or delete the error only deepened the mess.
And Chris Messina has made his suggestion for a t-shirt already:
Original at Flickr
Here’s a video showing the actual event:
Poor guy. Must be horrible demoing things when they go as bad as that.
English only?
Fun, but including voice recognition in the operating system is interesting. The biggest problem with it is - languages. Ok, so maybe Microsoft can manage to get Vista to understand “Dear mom” as… “Dear mom”. But how about “Kjære mamma”? There are several thousand languages in the world, and most of them are so small that they never even get their own version of Vista or OSX. Only 24 languages have their own version of Windows XP Pro (and 33 more as socalled “Multilingual User Interface Pack Languages”). I doubt that voice recognition will work any but the English version when Vista is launching sometime in 2007 (2008?)
And what about dialects? It will be a long, long time before computers understand all the different ways to speak English…