Mundie insists Windows Phone had Siri early
Microsoft's chief research officer Craig Mundie in an interview (video below) made the unusual attempt to claim that Microsoft had beaten Apple to market with an equivalent to Siri. He argued to Forbes that Windows Phone 7's voice command system from was somehow similar to Apple's but had arrived a year earlier. To him, Apple was just pitching the iPhone 4S technology as revolutionary because it had the feature, not because of any technical differences.
"It's good marketing, but at least as the technological capability, you could argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced," he said.
In actually giving an example of Windows Phone's voice support, however, he underscored the limitations. He only gave examples of basic voice dictation and Bing searches. "You can pick [it] up and say 'text Eric' and say what you wanna say and it transcribes it," he said. "I mean, all that's already there."
If not a conscious attempt to minimize the importance Siri, the statement would be a core misunderstanding of what Apple's system is doing, an unusual misstep for someone whose primary role is to understand and develop future technology. Siri is built around natural language and understands the relationships between words and people. Likewise, it can understand context, such as asking follow-up questions, and conduct multi-step actions.
Windows Phone's system is a much more basic voice command approach that demands specific syntax and can only perform straightforward tasks. Other than Bing, it also doesn't tap into any other services.
While it's true that Microsoft had voice command of any kind on any level, the statements appear more to follow in a tradition of the company attempting to dismiss any product that has a clear edge. CEO Steve Ballmer is well-known for having thought that the iPhone would have no chance and arguing that the then-current Windows Mobile could not only lead but get majority share. In the end, the OS collapsed under the weight of the iPhone and later Android, dropping Microsoft to just 1.5 percent share and forcing a complete reinvention of its OS strategy that has still left it somewhat behind peers in features and hardware.
By Electronista Staff
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