Will voice recognition continue to improve?

[Jcmg62]

I downloaded 8.1 yesterday and have only been playing around with cortana for a few hours (I'm based in surrey, UK). I have a badly mixed up quasi Scottish / Irish / South African accent (don't ask, my folks moved around a lot.....) and really expected her to misunderstand pretty much everything I said.

But she doesn't. In fact, I'd say that my voice commands are accurately picked up at least 95% of the time. Everything from "what's the weather like outside....now give me that in celcius" to "where's my nearest costa coffee" or "do you know any good Italian restaurants in Twickenham".......even "hey, sing me a song." She nails it perfectly.

That said, the 5% that she doesn't get can be pretty frustrating. It mostly comes down to things like setting calendar events or sending messages where your using someone's name that she struggles. Things like "calendar event: call Arthur Heywood and arrange for him to hand over to Scott Kilbride at Warrington head office" just came out as a garbled mess over and over again. She couldn't get herself around the names at all.

My question is this; is cortana self evolving? Is she learning how to better understand me everytime I use her or will she only improve when she receives an update from Microsoft?

 

[klkriz]

She's supposed to learn more about you as time goes on but I don't know about improving recognition.... But I'm interested to know! That would be great!

 

[Kaushik Banerjee]

Right now cortana is in preview . It will take some time before cortana is officially released. There obviously will be voice improvements. Actually a feature will be included where cortana will get accustomed to your speech and improved her search results


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[Athull]

I downloaded 8.1 yesterday and have only been playing around with cortana for a few hours (I'm based in surrey, UK). I have a badly mixed up quasi Scottish / Irish / South African accent (don't ask, my folks moved around a lot.....) and really expected her to misunderstand pretty much everything I said.

But she doesn't. In fact, I'd say that my voice commands are accurately picked up at least 95% of the time. Everything from "what's the weather like outside....now give me that in celcius" to "where's my nearest costa coffee" or "do you know any good Italian restaurants in Twickenham".......even "hey, sing me a song." She nails it perfectly.

That said, the 5% that she doesn't get can be pretty frustrating. It mostly comes down to things like setting calendar events or sending messages where your using someone's name that she struggles. Things like "calendar event: call Arthur Heywood and arrange for him to hand over to Scott Kilbride at Warrington head office" just came out as a garbled mess over and over again. She couldn't get herself around the names at all.

My question is this; is cortana self evolving? Is she learning how to better understand me everytime I use her or will she only improve when she receives an update from Microsoft?

She's still in beta and I think when they officially release it in UK it show have improved recognition for more accents relevant to Europe.

 

[Chris_Germany]

of course they improve it. Cortana is beta, that said it works great!

 

[klkriz]

Right, of course they will improve it but the cool thing will be Cortana getting to know the nuances of your voice by itself.

 

[fwaits]

Cortana is powered by the Bing backend, so yes it will improve as they improve the backend cloud functions. Voice recognition, features, etc. are all driven by the data on the backend. In fact now that it's out there and as it rolls out officially that means they will have more data sampling from users to improve it even faster.

 

[Joel S79]

She's still in beta and I think when they officially release it in UK it show have improved recognition for more accents relevant to Europe.

This. It's probably a bit of dumb luck and the weird US accents that it can understand you at all (I'd like to see you type out how that calendar event request sounded phonetically, lol). As it gets localized, it'll probably better pick up the accents and slang used over there.

 

[Jcmg62]

It was a mess, I'll attach a screenshot when I'm in front of my laptop.......

 

[fabiooli]

Funny, 'coz she understood everything I asked her until now and my mother language is not english. I am having fun with this feature and I bet it well beep getting better as Microsoft seem to be decided to face Apple and Samsung now. :evil: