Microsoft’s Craig Mundie claimed last week that Windows Phone 7 has had similar functionality to Siri for the last year. How true is that claim?
Jason over at techAU decided to put that claim to the test, pitting Siri against TellMe, Windows Phone 7′s voice assistant.
Spoiler alert: Siri works a lot better for the tested voice commands.
What do you reckon? A fair test, or an unfair comparison of different voice control systems? My viewpoint is that there’s still a significant social barrier to overcome before voice control becomes useful anywhere but the car in any case, but Siri’s upside seems to be larger. Microsoft could always jump ahead of Apple in voice control technology, but then from Mundie’s own statement, they’ve had a year to do so. [techAU]
allan
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:06 AMjust a little bit embarrassing for microsoft
Chris
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:09 AMTellme – fail
TSH
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:10 AMI have and love a WP7.5 handset, but there’s no question in my mind that the voice-command system is just not quite there yet. I’ve not played with Siri, but WP7.5 still relies on a much smaller vocabulary of key words and phrases. Plus it may be the Aussie accent but it just doesn’t get words right.
*shrug* the acutal utility of any voice-controlled system still leaves much to be desired. But these are important (IMHO) steps toward a Star Trek-like experience where the computer will respond quite well to completely natural language.
Antonia
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:24 AMHave you ever sat behind someone and directed them while they were using a computer? After about 30 seconds you get so annoyed at how hard it gets that you push them out of the way and do it yourself.
Though I’ve not used any voice recognition for a few years but its my opinion that getting a computer to understand natural human language is very, very difficult. (and I don’t expect a breakthrough any time soon).
z3d
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:55 AMdid you even watch the video?
Musky
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 2:11 PM“I haven’t used the software, I haven’t watched the video and I only read the headline but in my completely uninformed opinion it’ll never work I tells ya!”
Seriously, that’s what you post sounded like.
dylan
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:37 AMwow my tellkme does not seem THAT shit
mind you i only use it to ‘call sally’ or ‘text jim’
i is a touch screen phone so may aswell use my finger for the rest
widow maker
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 6:54 AMcalendar integration on Siri does seem like a pretty useful feature. As useful as being able to launch apps on Tellme… I don’t know. But I would probably use the calendar on my phone a lot more if I could add entries using voice rather than typing.
Mark
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:03 AMMundie didn’t handle it very well, he should have said “yeah, it’s interesting” or just said something non-commital without being congratulatory (like a politician), but he dug a hole for himself. Or he could have said “we’ve been working on something like that for a while” if he wanted to tease that MS had something coming soon (and I am assuming they actually do – see http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/search.aspx?q=voice for research projects involving ‘voice’). For example this is one from August 2011 – http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/speechrecognition-082911.aspx.
As for the video above, and Siri in general – it won’t change my decision of what phone I will buy next in any way; voice interaction is not on my list of priorities. In that sense too I can kind of see Mundie’s point – kind of a “really? Voice interaction. Is that what you’ve got this year?” and he can’t see why people think it’s a big deal, so it must be the result of marketing.
I guess the thing is will Siri go the way of FaceTime, or will it keep up the momentum? It seems pretty useful, but I don’t have it so I don’t really know. I am interested to see if there is some sort of API coming where apps can use it, and I really want to see Apple’s response to the set my thermostat, start my car kind of hacks.
John
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 11:08 AMGo the way of FaceTime? My wife and her mother use FaceTime every day, they love it.
MDolley
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:11 AMI really like my HTC Mozart, but I have to agree that the voice stuff is less than impressive.
Siri (in my experience) is a feature worthy of it’s own TV ad. The voice features of other platforms aren’t.
joedy Ssmith
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:15 AMha ha at teen anal
Mark
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:26 AMI read a comment that said it probably found that in his search history, hahaha
amiga_tone
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 12:50 PMActually it had nothing to do with the history, I tried the same command on my Mozart 7 and it gave the same result.
Admittedly like all the previous responses, TellMe has a specific set of commands (Call , Text ) unlike Siri which is more able to translate the linguistic aspect.
Richard
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:27 AMIsn’t this just because Microsoft’s tellme isn’t compatible with the aussie accent? Siri was just the same at the beginning no?
Kev
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:41 AMAnd Apple fixed it within a month – IF that is in fact the issue, then Microsoft don’t seem to care much about addressing it after a year.
widow maker
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 7:01 AMAnd Apple has a 3.5 inch display (so they can boast the highest pixel density like we’re talking about 55 inch HDTV displays) and carried a 5 mp camera for four years… I would say those deficiencies are more substantive to the user experience than say, Tellme not recognizing an Australian accent very well. Every time you pick up your phone you have to deal with the display, how often to we really find need to “talk” to our phones. Interesting criticism from MS just like when they made fun of PS2 being able to stand upright saying it was a good way to knock over and damage your console and then Xbox 360 came out and guess what, they made it so you can stand it upright. But at any rate for the most part for the functions you really use voice control on a phone for Tellme works well. Not as slick as Siri, can’t walk thru the park and have an (almost) complete convo with Tellme like you apparently can with Siri but when’s the last time anybody saw someone having such a convo with their phone… or maybe that’s just because we didn’t have Siri and now we’ll all be doing it all the time. I doubt it but I also doubted the Snuggie so…
Temujin
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:36 AMThis is a stupid comparison. To start with TellMe isn’t a natural language assistant. The way you command it is different.
Secondly an Australian doing this test is useless. TellMe on WP7 doesn’t do Aussie accents much the same way Kinect doesn’t, now it’s coming to Kinect so hopefully they move that regionalisation to Aus.
Finally, test both without an internet connection, say you have no coverage with vodafail. Ask it its question and ask the WP7 to “Text Simone” and see which one works the best.
They are both very different systems, voice control isn’t new but the natural language recognition is definitely cool. I love how someone can set a calendar to “remind me when I am home”. That I would use. Also Apple has the advantage of supporting Aussie accents.
MDolley
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 3:24 PM“This is a stupid comparison” – Then why did Microsoft make it? Windows Phone 7.5 and iOS5 are products that are both currently available. TellMe is the built in voice software Microsoft offer, Siri is the built in voice software that Apple offer. It’s a fair comparison.
ekbul
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:47 AMSiri seems really impressive but in my opinion it still suffers from the fact that you still seem to need to interact manually with the phone to initiate it and confirm some actions just like the other voice actions and for me if I’m going to be touching the phone anyway I’d rather do it myself.
jack
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 10:53 AMSomething wrong with this guy’s phone… Only ever used tell-me in the car, and that was yesterday as I dictated an SMS to my dad when I was driving to the airport. No issue with it at all.
Siri is just a nice-wrapper around basically the same thing.
MDolley
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 3:12 PM“Siri is just a nice-wrapper around basically the same thing.”
TellMe uses a very limited number of keywords, while Siri attempts to understand natural language. It’s a pretty big difference when you are actually using it.
I can tell Siri to set my alarm for 2 hours from now. I tried that with my windows phone and it searched for “female armpit two hours from”
Here is a very limited list of what TellMe can do http://www.microsoft.com/windowsphone/en-us/howto/wp7/basics/use-speech-on-my-phone.aspx
Barry
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 11:11 AMLike anything new that requires speech, a learning curve or teaching process is involved and Apple and Microsoft you have to do this. I wouldn’t mind knowing if the two were taught the Australian accent before testing because the Microsoft TellMe is basically designed for USA first. One of the things that I don’t like about Microsoft and it has to change it is that they think local and not global (Apple think Global). I have a WP7 and I love the whole thing but the voice is something that lets them down.
In the interview with the Microsoft person, he is right in saying that Microsoft has had it for almost a year before Apple and Apple copied a lot of the features from WP7, Android and other phones like WebOS.
jack
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 11:30 AMYou’re right Barry. Microsoft do think local.
Which is why every product they make (just not at first) has localization settings for every major language/dialect. Is also recommended approach for developers on their platform to leverage MS frameworks to do this.
Then again, I deal with sharepoint.. bug they only just fixed: Solution deployments fail through the browser if the brower langauge is not set to En-US…. Heh
JonBOY
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 11:11 AMScoreboard:
Siri = 1, TellMe = Teen anal.
Ash
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 11:16 AMFact is that Siri does what it does, and it does it best while also looking sexy (ie, Siri’s interface to show you her responses). WP7 and Android voice assistants are almost there but hugely lacking in accuracy and presentation. This is where Siri wins, and therefore wins people.
FJC
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 11:35 AMDon’t think I have to watch that video to know tellme isn’t as good as Siri. Still, love how my Omnia 7 can read incoming messages and i can reply without touching the phone (while its connected to my car stereo using the headphone jack). Sadly though, my replies have to me short and simple for tellme to accurately translate what I’m saying, and even then it sometimes doesn’t get it right ><. Still a good effort since microsoft had other more important features to throw into the mango update.
Mark
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 12:49 PMI thought the same thing, but I *think* (not sure) that if you hear the new message sound in the car you can hold down the bluetooth button to initiate voice control (now Siri of course) and then say “read new messages”. Almost totally hands free but not 100%? Then after it is finished just do the same thing and say “text xxxxxx” to dictate a text.
I don’t have an iPhone 4S to test that, but someone must be able to confirm it’s possible.
Not that I care, I have decided to get a new Nokia Lumia when they come out and I don’t really care about Siri or the front facing camera, I won’t use either.
NateC
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 12:44 PMMicrosofts tellme has a new name…
Teen anal stain detector!
Will
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 1:17 PMVoice control is stupid.
light487
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 3:16 PMWhether or not MS’s version was better or not.. Siri is the the famous one. As much as I dislike the Apple business model, you can’t fault them for being excellent marketeers.
Kroo
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 6:53 PMThis reminds me of the Microsoft Vista voice recognition fail. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kDcUEDfmY
Microsoft do one thing very very well. Release half baked software and think thats fine. Just once, could they focus and get something totally right from day one without the need for constant bug fixes all the way through.
David
Monday, November 28, 2011 at 7:04 PMIt’s not half baked so much as not properly localised – it doesn’t support Australian accents, so that’s why the voice recognition fail.
Even if it did though, siri would still be a fair way ahead – using tellme is very much like dictating a command line while siri is much more orientated to natural language..
widow maker
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 6:49 AMif you’re looking to do things like say “thank you” to your phone or “will you marry me…” these kind of gimmicky capabilities that Apple developers are apparently spending so much time on then yes, that’s true… but as far as core usefulness I don’t think Siri is that far ahead, both will get you the weather for the city you need when you ask, stock prices, direction, etc… both will even return results to, “is steve jobs dead…” Tellme returns internet results, Siri returns a clever, “Apple doesn’t tell me everything…” response…
widow maker
Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 6:12 AMBased on video I’ve seen it’s clear that this particular comparison is flawed because Tellme doesn’t support the Australian accent whereas Siri does. A more honest comparison would include an American English speaker since both platforms recognize that accent. This link shows and English speaker with an Indian accent – both platforms stumble occasionally. It’s is however clear that Siri is the more powerful and well integrated feature of the two. I use Bing’s speech recognition on my Android phone and have never encountered the poor results demonstrated in this video so I imagine it’s Australian English, rather than Tellme, that is the problem in this test.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/india/windows-phone-7-voice-commands-and-the-indian-accent/772
Matt Bubernak
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 4:27 AMWhat makes this video stupid is the fact that you used so many commands tellme isn’t build to respond to. There is a clear list of terms it deals with, and you failed to use them. What were you expecting? You didn’t need to do this test, it’s not built to respond any of your statements. All you had to do was state that that m$ employee was wrong in his statement because they are different voice control systems.