Techworld.com - Microsoft to offer voice command with mobiles

Techworld.com - Microsoft to offer voice command with mobiles

New version of Windows Mobile to feature Tellme technology

Nancy Gohring, IDG news service
29 April 2009

Microsoft is set to introduce a speech-recognition application for the forthcoming Windows Mobile upgrade. The company plans to announce a new service that will work on Windows Mobile 6.5 devices and will let people speak into the phone to search the Internet, make phone calls and dictate text messages.

The technology comes from Tellme, a company acquired by Microsoft in 2007. Key to the offering is a dedicated button that launches the service on the phone, said Marcello Typrin, director of product management for Tellme. To make it really easy to use, the service should be accessible from a single point, he said. That compares to the iPhone experience, where users must navigate to the apps page and open the Google Mobile App to use a similar voice-activated search service.

In addition, the Tellme application is about more than just search. Windows Mobile 6.5 users will be able to say "call" and a name, and the phone will automatically dial a name from the address book. Users can also say "text," and then dictate a message that will be converted to text and then sent.

Otherwise, if users just start speaking, the technology will automatically search for the words.

The Tellme service will automatically be set to use Microsoft's Live Search, but people will be able to change it to use another search provider if they want to, Typrin said. "We don't want to force someone onto a search engine they don't want to use," he said.

Windows Mobile customers can already use voice commands with Live Search, but the Tellme application adds the text and voice call features and pulls all three into a single, easily accessible service.

While customers may need to push fewer buttons to launch the service, they have to push buttons more often while using the service than do their iPhone-using counterparts. With the Tellme text application, for example, users hit the button before they start speaking their message and hit it again when they're done speaking. By contrast, the Google Mobile App automatically starts listening when the user moves the phone to the ear and then stops when the user is finished speaking.

The offering will come free with Windows Mobile 6.5, the next generation of the operating system that is scheduled to start appearing on phones in the second half of the year, but it's up to the phone maker to include it. Microsoft doesn't intend to make the service exclusive to Windows Mobile phones, so other platforms may start using it in the future, Typrin said.

The application will also become available in Microsoft's forthcoming mobile application marketplace, so people who buy Windows Mobile 6.5 phones that don't come pre-loaded with the capability will be able to download it later. If they do, they'll follow instructions to assign the Tellme function to a specific button on the phone. They could, for example, set up the service so that pressing and holding the Windows button that comes on most Windows Mobile phones will activate the service..

This article was printed from Techworld : www.techworld.com
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© 2009 : All rights reserved

Hybrid positioning technologies are getting traction

Hybrid positioning technologies are getting traction

Hybrid positioning technologies are getting traction

Many new LBS applications such as social networking, local search, pedestrian and mass transit navigation or geo-tagging are expected to be used in places such as indoor or urban canyons where GPS takes forever to have a fix - or never does. Therefore, alternative and hybrid positioning technologies such as Wi-Fi and Cell-ID will become increasingly important to offer a smooth experience to consumers.

“Users expect a seamless and transparent location experience regardless of application or environment,” says ABI Research director Dominique Bonte. “Since no single positioning technology can provide this, the future will be about hybrid positioning systems, combining A-GPS, Cell-ID, Wi-Fi, cellular, motion sensors, and even TV broadcast and proximity technologies such as Bluetooth, NFC and RFID. A-GPS, Wi-Fi and Cell-ID will be the winning combination offering accuracy, availability, interoperability and short fix times at low cost. It will represent 25% of all positioning solutions by 2014. Stand-alone Cell-ID and/or Wi-Fi will remain important in regions with low GPS handset penetration.“

Step by step this market is taking shape. Two announcements made last week are demonstrating it.
First, Skyhook Wireless, the leader in the Wi-Fi positioning space (the Boston-based company powers the iPhone), has upgraded its SDK to include Android support, as well as hybrid positioning (GPS+Cell-ID+Wi-Fi) which offers a comprehensive solution to software developers willing to add location to their mobile applications.

Second, the German software and service provider Spotigo announced that its WiFi-based Positioning Solution (“WiPS”) is now available in more than 25 countries. “The most important cities in countries like the United States, Germany, UK, Spain, France, Russia, India, Korea, etc. are covered significantly already”, said Spotigo in a statement. “We are looking forward to being able to provide a world-wide service within the next few months,” said Daniel Prümers, CEO of Spotigo.

Navizon’s community
In addition to these public announcements, New-York City-based Navizon has been harnessing the power of its community which nowadays counts over 800,000 members. Indeed, while Skyhook Wireless relies on a fleet of paid drivers that build a Wi-Fi map database, Navizon relies on its members who automatically report and update new Wi-Fi hotspots around the world. Moreover, some of these users are getting money in doing that, because Navizon choosed to reward its most active users. As a result, Navzon has built a decent Wi-Fi and cell-ID data map for cities in emerging or developing markets such as Moscow, St Petersburg, San Paolo, Istanbul, Bangalore or Johannesburg. It might take months - if not years - to Skyhook to get there. But the Boston-based company has the advantage to set its database mapping priority on its own and to have a tighter control over the data.

Google and Microsoft
Google has been building its own reference databases of cell-tower and/or Wi-Fi hotspot locations (called MyLocation) via user-generated content and/or self-learning mechanisms, and is offering it for free to developers. However, Google does not offer any service level agreement, does not disclose its coverage and has loose privacy rules. Microsoft is also starting to show interest in hybrid positioning technologies. Last week the Redmond- based corporation integrated cell tower triangulation into its Live Search Mobile application. It would not be surprising to see Microsoft interested in Wi-Fi positioning too.

If we look at the market as a whole, wireless operators are slowly but surely giving away their primacy over their customer’s location data, now offered as a web service by a wide variety of providers. The range of these providers is growing but there is however a strong barrier of entry: the gathering of Cell-ID and Wi-Fi data on a worldwide scale.

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