Apple has the Siri. And Microsoft? Well it has had a ‘Siri’ long before the Apple one, called as Tellme. In a chat with Eric Savitz from Forbes, Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie talked a bit about Kinect and Siri. According to Craig Mundie, Microsoft has had Speech-recognition features for over a year now in windows Phone 7 devices and more lately, in Mango handsets. “You could argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year“.
The Tellme feature in Windows Phone Mango devices has been updated with a few more capabilities which Siri also shares on ground level. However, Microsoft has plans to take this to a new level in upcoming devices by enabling the Tellme, which now looks more like a command-driven tool, to interact with the user just like any other one.
Coming back to Siri, Apple did not have much new to offer in the iPhone 4s device except for the Siri. And it’s this winning card on which Apple focused their marketing resources primarily. On a contrast, the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) devices have a whole load of new features and capabilities (500 in number) and the highly positive response of the Nokia Lumia 800 just proves that.
As Steve Ballmer said during the WPC 2011 that technology and softwares should be intuitive in such a way that the user should not feel the need to use hands to type or press buttons. And this did not particularly refer to Bing while being demonstrated. Microsoft wants just that in upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices.
Presently, there are a huge number of Facebook users who update their status hands-free using a Windows Phone device and in the near future, Microsoft has plans to improve this by adding a lot many new features into the skill set of Tellme such that users can make calls by calling out nicknames, redial a number, start a favorite app, do an online search and lots more with both hands off the mobile device. Pretty cool!
This just takes its motto “Put People first” forward.
