Improved Voice Controls in Kinect: What Does that Mean for Windows Phone?

GeekWire posted a YouTube video highlighting the improved UI in the Kinect after having received the Fall update for Xbox 360. The Kinect is able to interpret more commands and that is incorporated in the gameplay as is seen in the video.

So what does that have to do with Windows Phone? Apparently everything. Windows Phone and Kinect both use the same system for voice commands meaning that improvements on the Kinect should defintely be able to crossover to Windows Phone.

The reason that these major improvements are possible is that Microsoft utilizes a unified cloud based service for all of its’ voice applications, thereby allowing them to collect a large amoung of data so the system can learn quicker.

“There’s only so much you’re going to learn from a lot of people saying “agent,” or a limited set of words. The thing that’s so cool with Bing voice search is that you would get a really diverse set of utterances, and we saw that really take off. Across the industry, anywhere from 25 to 30 percent of mobile search are now done using voice. The interesting thing for us is that on Windows Phone, we actually much higher, and we attribute to that to speech becoming core to the user interface (in Windows Phone).”said Ilya Bukeshteyn, senior director of Microsoft Tellme.

Seeing the Kinect’s imporoved voice commands get me really excited. This is going to add so much more to Xbox, but all the while will also help to improve the Windows Phone experience.

Source: Geekwire; via, Mobility Digest