Windows VISTA Reviewed by CNET: "Warmed Over XP"

[schmosef]

Ok, here's an interesting one:

Vista, Please Don't Listen To Me

I guess they'll have to turn off voice recognition by default in certain scenarios.

[Brian Ellis]

Well, the VR in Vista is crap, anway. I've a long experience as a VR user and I've used, for most of the time, the IBM engines. In the early 1990s, ViaVoice was a discrete word system and achieved amazing results, once you learnt how to speak to the computer. About 1996, they introduced continuous speech for Chinese and a couple of years later they introduced SimplySpeaking Gold for continuous speech in English, French and German. Easier to use, but poorer in accuracy, although it improved through the versions. What killed IBM is that they never made it beyond Win98SE. When I needed it for W2k/XP, I had to switch to Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which was very poor in the mid-90s (I rarely got better than 85% recognition), but the current version is excellent. On a good day, I can get >99% accuracy.

I gave the Vista VR a good whirl. I trained and used it for quite some time with my voice. The response took me back about 10 years. There were two main problems:
a) there was no tolerance in pronunciation. The greatest difficulty with VR is the small word, a, in, to, if, it, an, for and so on. It required exactly the same pronunciation each time, even though it is natural to say 'to' slightly differently if it is a preposition followed by a vowel or a consonant or even part of an infinite verb. It doesn't like this.
b) there was little or no contextual correction of homophones. It could never write "Please write to Mr Wright right away, to tell him two o'clock is too late". Both IBM and DNS could do this after the initial training session as long ago as the mid-90s.

As for the so-called security lapse mentioned in the article, I think it is hair-splitting. The moment I'm distracted from a dictation session, I avoid random noises being picked up by the mike by "Go-to-sleep", which puts it into abeyance. Then VR uses a noise-cancelling mike so, unless the mike was placed less than ~8 cm from the speaker, it wouldn't react, because AGC is disabled for the application to prevent noise from upsetting the applecart during pauses in the speech. Finally, the system is trained to one individual's voice. A trained system, reaching 98-99% or higher accuracy, would get <20% accuracy with any other individual's voice, probably close to zero. After an hour of dictation, the accuracy plummets to abysmal, because one's voice alters imperceptibly to the ear but perceptibly to the VR, because of fatigue in the larynx, which stretches the vocal cords by about a mm. To avoid this, I usually dictate in ~30 minute sessions with ~30 minute intervals. It is that sensitive. I cannot believe this so-called security risk is real.

From what I've heard, MS developed their own VR engine, but I don't know how heavily they used others' systems. It would not surprise me if, in fact, they rehashed IBM's engine for Vista, as IBM is virtually out of the market now. All I do know is that the Vista VR is not a patch on DNS and is not likely to be a serious contender for corporate use.

[ND66]

.... End result of this is all major vendors have had to modify their OpenGL ICD in order to get it to work.

I work with Unigraphics software for the past 12 years. Started on Unix, then they moved to Windows NT & Unix. And now, if you’re NOT on Windows XP, you’re missing lots of good features, NX was redesigned to interact with XP.

Anyway, you have no idea how complex this application is. Sometimes it took years, not months to fix a bug.
Moving to XP platform wasn’t pretty, but I never saw that much of performance decrease when moved to the XP environment.
There was a decrease, but not as much as Tom’s Hardware states. I’m not sure what they did to test it, did they have the latest patches from UG or what, but all the graphic software they tested shows a major decrease in speed.
Now that worries me a little… .


.

[schmosef]

Well MS essentially already has the majority of the iLife applications covered with Windows Media Player, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker and DVD Maker. So you're really only missing a GarageBand and iWeb (which is crap anyhow) equivalent.

I couldn't say whether any of those are on-par with or superior to their iLife counterparts.

Even if MS did introduce an iLife-like suite that offered advantages over the aforementioned in-built applications, I'm not sure they would match Apple's pricing scheme for iLife ($79, or $20 for a 5-license family pack).

Anyone know of a good Windows counterpart to iPhoto? I'm specifically asking about something that is setup to make photobooks.

[Nowhere]

Picasa, I guess... (though I'm not actually sure what you mean by "photobooks"; And there's also Photoshop Album, not updated in a while though...)

[schmosef]

Apple has an arrangement with what I guess is a network of print shops.

You can layout a photo book combining your photos with their templates and upload it to Apple who will print on-demand as many of them as you like.

The books are very nicely done. The binding and paper is top notch. I've seen a few done by others and they are very impressive.

http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/features/books.html

[Nowhere]

There's "Order prints" button in Picasa, not sure if any of the providers (you can choose one you like) offer things comparable to what Apple does...

[Jessterw]

Apple has an arrangement with what I guess is a network of print shops... The books are very nicely done. The binding and paper is top notch. I've seen a few done by others and they are very impressive.

I can vouch for that. We did several different books (varying sizes and photos) when Jillian (our youngest) was born and then when she turned one. Everyone who got one loved it and we still get asked how we did them.

Not surprising, many are disappointed that we did it with a Mac-only application and a few have tried Window-based software specifically for photobooks and have been a little more than unhappy with the results.

[schmosef]

About a year ago, IIRC, Gates specifically promised that Microsoft would deliver something to compete with Apple in this space.

I think he said it at CES or some such trade show.

Has anyone heard anything about this?

[wkulecz]

ATI does seem to be dragging ther feet with their video card drivers. Not sure why that is.

Its not FUD. ATI has a long history going back to Win98 and earlier of not providing drivers for older cards. I swore off ATI after I got burned buying a bunch of ATI PCI cards to use as second monitors on Win98 while waiting for W2K -- drivers for W2K never came! Haven't gone near an ATI card since. Now that they are part of AMD maybe things will change, but I avoid video on the motherboard like the plague.

W2K still works for me and I'm sticking with it. I'm just saying NO to all the DRM Vista crams down your throat, XP's activation was more that I was willing to put up with.

--wally.