Microsoft launches mobile Voice Command

On Monday Microsoft will launch Voice Command for Pocket PC and Pocket PC Phone Edition.

The 5MB application, available only as a download for $39.95, will give users of mobile devices voice-activated command and control over contact and calendar lookup, voice dialing, application launching, and music selection by genre, album, or artist. 

Voice Command is licensed on a per-device basis and a user would be required to uninstall it from one device in order to install it on another mobile device, said Peter Wengert, marketing manager for the Voice Command product at Microsoft.

The voice engine in the application is an embedded version of Microsoft’s speech engine for servers and contains thousands of common names with multiple pronunciations to facilitate name recognition accuracy. Wengert pegged the accuracy rate at about 90 percent.

One industry analyst said 90 percent was not good enough.

“Voice recognition doesn’t work very well when there is external noise. It is not a big productivity enhancer,” said David Hayden, principal at MobileWeek, a mobile marketing research firm.

Microsoft is also moving beyond voice as a part of its multimedia for mobile initiatives. The company launched a Mobile Video Player reference platform, not unlike the Pocket PC reference platform, to encourage OEMs to build a new kind of multimedia device, Hayden said.

The mobile video player will compete with the Apple iPod but will have a video focus. Users will be able to download TV shows and movies, as an alternative to a portable DVD player, using USB, Firewire, IEEE 80211x, or through flash memory cards, 

Third-party content providers, such as XSight, are already working with the movie studios, which are obviously concerned about copy protection. XSight is doing the back-end software and services for the DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection.

“Users will be able to hook a video media player up to their cable box in order to download a movie,” Hayden said.