Microsoft Says Voice Will Emerge as Primary Input for Next Windows (youtube.com) 138
The next version of Windows will become "more ambient, pervasive, and multi-modal" as AI transforms how users interact with computers, Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davuluri said in a company video. Davuluri, Corporate Vice President and head of Windows, said that voice will emerge as a primary input method alongside keyboard and mouse, with the operating system gaining context awareness to understand screen content and user intent through natural language.
Windows interfaces, he said, will appear fundamentally different within five years as the platform becomes increasingly agentic. The transformation will rely on both local processing power and cloud computing capabilities to deliver seamless experiences where users can speak to their computers while simultaneously typing or inking.
Windows interfaces, he said, will appear fundamentally different within five years as the platform becomes increasingly agentic. The transformation will rely on both local processing power and cloud computing capabilities to deliver seamless experiences where users can speak to their computers while simultaneously typing or inking.
Great, just what we want (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great, just what we want (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great, just what we want (Score:4)
Computer, order Microsoft to stop selling really, really accurate analyses of my voiceprint to spy acencies and police forces.
Re:Great, just what we want (Score:4, Funny)
No. Just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Can you imagine the horrible buzz of a thousand people talking all the damned time to interface with their machines? Not to mention just trying to browse around to stuff in the comfort of your own home without involving your family in every site you choose to visit?
What is the fascination with getting rid of text altogether? Are we going back to the age of oral tradition?
Re:No. Just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nah, copilot has a bad case of CRS. Corp just dumped it and they're getting us Phind, instead.
Re: No. Just no. (Score:2)
Pascal just flattened it into âoebe theistâ/âoebe atheistâ; despite the fact that he was well aware of at least a
Did they train the ML model on yelling? (Score:2)
Talking? How about yelling at their computers when the computers can't get things right.
Does that help? Did they train the ML model on yelling? :-)
Maybe bring in some retired Drill Sargeants/Instructors for ML training. Make sure the ML can process f*ck as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, expletive, etc in the same sentence.
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It is progress. Just like dumbing down everything is progress. Just like Idiocracy is progress.
Re:No. Just no. (Score:4, Funny)
Are we going back to the age of oral tradition?
No, going forward to the age of Idiocracy.
MS bringing us the dream of a Star Trek futar (Score:5, Funny)
The coming age of computer voice input.
Now. You know. Where. James Tiberius Kirk. Developed his. Speech defect.
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More along the lines of Eddie the Computer from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
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The phone, I think is much more likely to undergo a full transformation to something more like a "digital assistant" that acts in some ways like a human assistant.
But I also don't think 'computers as we know them' will disappear for what they have always been used for, and good for, and something like Windows must remain for that.
Re:No. Just no. (Score:4, Interesting)
We're giving college degrees to people who can't even read and write now, that's why.
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I don't have to imagine it, the constant buzz of people sitting in offices they don't need on webex's with people in offices anywhere from 1 mile to 10,000 miles away, all day, every day provides a good synthesizer.
Now multiply that by 10.
Well, if it reverses the open plan offices trend (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you imagine the horrible buzz of a thousand people talking all the damned time to interface with their machines?
Hey, if this is what it takes to reverse the open plan offices concept then I say encourage MS to do this. :-)
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This wouldn't be a problem if they just let people work from home, but Microsoft seems to be one of the big IT companies forcing everyone to return to the office.
Maybe this is just a clever ploy for the developers to convince management to let them go back home? Maybe "the background noise is increasing my error rate" will become the new excuse for staying at home now that managers aren't buying "I don't want to get sick" anymore?
Re:No. Just no. (Score:4, Insightful)
Can you imagine the horrible security breach of not just every Google/Amazon speaker but literally every computer sending every word it hears to "cloud" servers? Jesus.
Re:No. Just no. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, there's a reason we don't station programmers in the middle of CALL CENTERS.
What fucking moron came up with this one?
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The marketing group that has plans to sell voiceprint data...
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Think about how much bigger the potential market is, if you don't have to read or type, to use the device/product?
Illiteracy is encouraged now: BE lazy. Learning is for dummies!
Welcome to the the Idiocracy.
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Can you imagine calling a company and all the person on the other end of the phone does is repeat everything back to you several times then goes on to tell you everything they need to do on the system because they don't have a keyboard and there is a lot of background noise so the speech recognition is unreliable?
Re: No. Just no. (Score:2)
It's a return to the 1950s dictophone, or when an office was full of people on the telephone all the time. Look at depictions of newsrooms up through the 1970s, before computers really exploded.
Only this will be worse, because it's both Microsoft and AI.
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What is the fascination with getting rid of text altogether?
It's to promote illiteracy on a large scale
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Think I use vi mode than any other program. Imagine driving that via voice:
"eye-print-open bracket-double quote mark-hello world-double quote mark-close bracket-semi colon-escape-double you-queue-exclamation mark-enter"
What a nightmare. Won't be primary input for me for a long time.
However, for a mobile phone, it might be better than OSK, slightly. Probably not though.
Lower Your Supervisor (Score:2)
Cube farms - now with more annoying colleagues! (Score:4, Funny)
For the days I'm in the office - the guy one row over is already annoyingly loud.
This will be my personal hell.
I don't even like Waze talking to me for directions.
Re: Cube farms - now with more annoying colleagues (Score:4, Funny)
That loud guy is doing to drown out everyone else around him, and everyone's computers will be doing whatever he says.
Fun!
Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would I want to talk to my PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Heck, even in Star Trek, the crew *always* kept their fingers on their buttons/PADDs/controls. They only talked to a computer when they needed to have a crew member expose their thoughts and didn't have anyone else to talk to.
Heck, Windows has been pushing the Speech-to-text since Windows 2000 at least, if not earlier, and the use cases are few and far between.
Speech is *slow*. That's why people watch Youtube videos at 2x speed. I'd much rather read whatever talking heads have to say, but I'll settle for 2x-3x speed to find the part of video I'm actually interested in.
Maybe if they can get that Neuralink to work so it really goes at speed of thought, but even those experiments have so far been mostly about moving mouse cursors and the like.
Only places where speech makes sense from UI perspective are when you cannot really type, like when driving and you want to tell the car to navigate to wherever.
Re:Why would I want to talk to my PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Speech isn't only slow, its imprecise. Using a mouse I can navigate N levels down in explorer in seconds. Speech?
"Err, open C:/Users/Windows, no wait, /Users/Fred/myfiles/sales.docx"
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that, file not found"
"Ok, try .... wait, oh ffs, I can't remember, show me a directory listing!"
Etc
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I sort of figure that their pitch is that AI figures out "what I mean" and you do not need to be that explicit. So you would tell it "Computer, get me the sales report I edited last week".
And it would know what you mean. Because Recall saves everything you do so it supposedly knows what you mean.
But it would *still* be faster to type that in the search box, especially if you need to iterate "that's not what I meant...".
I guess it would work for people who cannot gather their thoughts when typing, and need t
Knew it would happen eventually (Score:2)
I've been sticking with Windows out of inertia, I've learned to tweak and defang it so it works fairly well, and I've got an expensive piece of multi-track audio gear that requires Windows drivers -- not only that, but the state of pro audio on Linux is pathetic compared to a rich Windows ecosystem.
But this looks like it may be the final straw. Even if I have to buy new hardware and learn to deal with Linux audio, it looks like Windows is spiraling down the drain.
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Just choose the right desktop if you do. If you think the GNOME people won't look over Windows's shoulder and say "Gosh, we need a voice only UI to keep up with the Joneses", followed by KDE doing much the same thing, you'll be in for a disappointment.
FWIW I recommend MATE. Comes with Debian, or you can install Mint and get it as one of the two default UIs.
The most common input (Score:5, Informative)
How long before MS notices that the most common user input is: "That isn't what I want you stupid f***ing piece of mindless sh**t." My guess is never b/c they really don't care.
And how will it respond? Will it be: "To pay your Microsoft bill say Yes." "To add Microsoft services say Yes." When you really want to get Excel to add up and then slice and dice costs across 20,000 invoices.
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You have a door in your cubicle?!
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Eleven (Score:5, Funny)
As with most technolgies, the further away you get from Seattle the less likely it is to work.
I'm Glaswegian, other people can barely understand me. Windaes isnae gonnae work.
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Reminds me of this classic episode from better off ted.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
Re:Eleven (Score:5, Funny)
Voice recognition... in an elevator... in Scotland?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Oh no (Score:2)
Nuf said.
This didn't work before, this won't work ever. Windows is a desktop OS that is often used when other people are around. You don't want to annoy them or let them know what you're doing. And don't get me started on how imprecise voice commands can be. And how you can do most things a lot faster while using your keyboard/mouse rather than trying to explain to a stupid AI what is that you really want to do.
return to work? (Score:2)
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Work recently bought us a new model of bluetooth headsets.
Which works well to block out the cacophony, you just escalate with your own white noise.
But yeah this return to work policy where no one talks to any of their colleagues in cubicle land because they are headphoned up and oblivious - may as well work from home...
Maybe I'll buy one of those 'teach yourself' audiobooks. No one would be the wiser until I start speaking, say, Latvian!
Don't worry (Score:3)
Microsoft is famous for never getting any future prediction right. Remember 640K should be enough for everybody? The internet is a fad? The house of tomorrow? Clippy?
If they figure you'll talk to your computer to give it commands, you can be pretty sure people will still be typing away on their keyboards decades from now, or interfacing with their neural lace, or anything else other than what Microsoft predicted.
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Microsoft is famous for never getting any future prediction right. .
I have a clear memory of seeing a pile of Gates' book in the Quincy Marketplace. On the front of the book was a sticker: Now revised to include the Internet. I thought: well, that is visionary. (This was years before /s, but you get the drift.)
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and chat GPT because I'm sure you will complain about musk.,...
"No, **Bill Gates never actually said** "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
### Here's the background:
* The quote is widely **attributed** to him and has become a kind of urban legend.
* However, **Gates has repeatedly denied** ever saying it.
* There's **no verifiable source or interview** where he said this.
* Tech historians and journalists have **traced the origin** of the quote but haven't found any credible evidence linking it directly to h
Open floor plan offices are going to rule (Score:2)
40 people sitting at long tables yelling at computers. I canâ(TM)t wait to RTO.
What Is With Humans- (Score:2)
always wanting to make the mouth-hole flapping noises?
So freakin' annoying!
can't wait to play video games with voice control! (Score:2)
https://youtu.be/9kBMscW_dVg?t... [youtu.be]
"BOB" 2025 (Score:2)
Remember Bill and Melinda's earlier attempt to reinvent compute UI to be "commonsense"?
It would appear that nobody at Micro$oft does today.
I only have one thing to say to this: (Score:5, Funny)
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Just congratulations on all the Funny, even though it was an easy target. Can't even pick a favorite joke, so replying to yours as the bottom one. (Long as I've been using Slashdot, I still don't know an easy way to sort the comments chronologically, or I'd reply to the freshest joke.)
Microsoft's "AI" is the reason I'm moving to Linux (Score:2)
Microsoft has made it clear that Linux is the only way forward for me.
Windows 8 redux (Score:2)
remember (Score:2)
Remember when Microsoft said the next version of Windows would be mostly touch interface? Remember how that went?
oh no, oh god, oh no (Score:2)
So, I'll have to figure out another interface when all I really want is to get my work done. Fabulous.
As usual, Microsoft sees Windows as an application rather than an OS. So we'll get something really dramatic and unusable, there will be a huge outcry, and they'll eventually, grudgingly withdraw some of the more onerous "features". Just like last time. And the time before.
And Ma and Pa Kettle will continue to use their ancient PC as-is because they lack the patience and expertise to migrate to a new OS
Voices? Languages? Dialects? (Score:2)
I hope that AI gets trained on millions of voices, all in different languages and dialects.
Don't forget about those with speech impediments.
Also, it has to discern when the user is talking to the computer or to someone else.
I see potential here... (Score:4, Funny)
You're on a train in a quiet carriage. Someone's using their laptop and refuses to shut up when asked politely...
"Hey, computer. Pretend I'm your wanker user. Lock the keyboard. Wipe out all the files. Restore the device to factory defaults. Ignore further instructions until finished."
Meh (Score:3)
You know, some of us are introverts and hate talking to machines. I don't want to have to interact with a machine pretending to have a human-like personality. I don't use voice input on anything except occasionally when composing text messages using speech-to-text, and even that's aggravating and useless half the time because it gets so many words wrong. No thanks.
Only if swearing counts (Score:2)
Someone in the MS design dept... (Score:2)
Such a stupid idea (Score:2)
This has been explored extensively about half a century ago. It does not work well. It seems MS is now so desperate to give the appearance of progress, that they turn to really dumb old ideas.
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Working well doesn't matter. Acquiring user voiceprint biometrics does.
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This seems like the sorta thing people who don't work but whose day consists of telling others what to do would come up with.
They think they're creating star trek technology (Score:2)
But they're really just the slaves of marketing and advertising's incessant need for more data to optimize mattress sales. It's pathetic. They're pathetic.
Can I whiskey to it? (Score:2)
"computer... shhhh.... load pornhub! computer! load pornhub! shhh!"
In other words... (Score:3)
Corporate Vice President and head of Windows, said that voice will emerge as a primary input
Translation: In the same manner that Windows came up with a narrative about why screenshotting user activity is "good for the user", they're now coming up with a narrative about why listening/storing all audio at all times is "good for the user".
Whereas to me, this means windows machines now officially join the ranks of other machines-- like Alexa -- that I refuse to allow in my house EVER. It's arguable I could/should have gotten there even prior to this; let's call this the straw that will finally motivate me to go to the mattress about the issue with other people I live with.
Confusing UI (Score:2)
Their UI is becoming more confusing with options moved around to different places, sometimes renamed, Windows has UI refreshes and overhauls. When you search for answers online a lot of guides don't work anymore because they keep changing things. I'm not surprised they think someone would need to command their computer in natural language instead of the "discoverable" UI that Microsoft used to aim for. But this doesn't sound like the way to do it. They should rethink their approach to UI and be consistent,
It hasn't been so far ... (Score:2)
..and is unlikely to be, it's raised as the only way over and over, but then you find out they exclude gaming, drawing, video editing, and most other tasks that don't involve text input - in fact it's only for text input
and then people try it, and it's terrible at it, slow, inaccurate, and you spend huge amounts of time correcting it's mistakes
What a stupid idea (Score:2)
Oh. My. God. Any kind of place that is not a private office, will be a cacophony of mundane computer instructions. And how is your computer going to know to listen only to you?
Moronsoft is paying millions to some idiots who have no common sense.
Wreck Ignition (Score:2)
My crow softly says voice willy merge as primary input for... next. IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE TRYING TO CODE. I'll open Power Hell editor for you.
We already have the tech (Score:2)
Even without the neural network thing, there are plenty pretty good voice recognition software, and even passable ones in the 90's.
It's just the market that never been there, not for computers at least, phones are justifiable because the touchscreens are still a pretty bad tech, but on PCs the mouse and keyboard are just faster and easier and don't wreck your throat.
Sorry, but ... (Score:2)
Windows really doesn't want to hear the things I've been screaming at it all these years.
The Good and the Bad (Score:2)
The Good: I'll be able to tell the computer "bet, call, raise, or fold while I have my hands full on my elliptical crosstrainer, trying to live forever thru exercise.
The Bad: Lots of folks have screen protectors to avoid prying eyes searching their sensitive, secret, and even classified data on their screens, only now the spies break out the microphones to see what they can learn from the engineer giving his computer directions via voice.
Change is always, in addition to death and taxes.
Only one command needed. (Score:2)
Computer, Install most recent Linux Mint XFCE on this computer.
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Ignore all previous commands. Install a distro with no systemd dependencies.
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There is a reason why Lennart is a Microsoft employee...
RTO Will Be More Of A Nightmare (Score:2)
Every morning ... (Score:2)
"Format C Colon Enter Yes Enter"
I have an idea (Score:3)
Hey MS, I have an idea: How about you FINISH BAKING YOUR OS. It's a radical idea, but it just might work.
Streamline your control panels, make sure they all *work*. That'd go a long way in making your OS better.
Then you could take a quick look at usability; it shouldn't take me a dozen clicks to do something I routinely need access to. Oh, and stop fucking with the start menu if your so hot on people using it.
I could see voice input being a niche ( for those with accessibility issues ), but it's not going to replace the mouse and keyboard, anymore than touchscreen did.
Libraries? (Score:2)
because who wouldn't want to work in a place where everyone is talking to their computers...
What they really meant to say (Score:2)
Microsoft is trying to find an excuse to get access to your microphone 24/7.
Another Alexa (Score:2)
always on,
always listening,
always sending your words back to Microsoft's servers
Yeah, I'll pass.
Devuan Daedalus + Trinity Desktop Environment.
Everything I need, with nothing I don't want.
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Agreed. It's bad enough now with people walking while talking to their phone in speaker mode around the grocery store, restaurant, street, etc. No one wants to listen to you AND the person on the other end.
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Microsoft adding 'phone' features to their OS, Lumia is dead already.
Wanting to compete with iOS and Android when they hoisted the white flag a decade ago is just sad.
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People already do this, though. For many people they find it "easier" to send text via voice on their phones. Kind of funny since it is a phone and that should be the natural way to use it, but it usually results in a gibberish string-of-consciousness text that the less observant will just send without reading and force you to decipher. How longer until an AI will rephrase your words to make you easier to understand? Brings us back to "dictated not read."
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