Microsoft talks up voice recognition

The next stop for artificial intelligence will be speech recognition software, according to Microsoft.

At this week's International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence the Redmond giant unveiled a free intelligent speech dictation application that will run on Windows CE.

Available in early September, the as yet unnamed application will translate spoken word into text. But the catch is that you will need to hook up wireless modems to the handheld and a desktop PC, so that the heavy duty processing can be carried out on the desktop.

The guts of an iPaq or similar CE device just aren't powerful enough to handle the task. The desktop will also have to host the speech engine, which will either be Office XP or Microsoft Speech API.

The intelligent software angle will also be woven into Microsoft's .Net initiative. A so-called 'notification platform', which seems similar to unified messaging, allows a user to receive information such as emails, phone calls and instant messages at a time, and on a platform, of their choice.

The software will know if a user is in a meeting and hold calls accordingly, or direct information to a PC, handheld or mobile phone. The software will be combined into Microsoft's HailStorm project, a key part of .Net.