Check out Pocketnow’s preview of voice features on the way in Mango.
Mango is the gift that keeps on giving. I had no idea of the depth of speech capability in the forthcoming update for Windows Phone until I saw this video – and read the blog post on the Windows Phone blog. It sounds like Chris Weber, President of Nokia USA showed something similar this week and called it a game changer. I’ll leave it to others to decide if that’s true or not, but if you’ve ever texted while driving (of course you haven’t) it could be for you.
I spent a while playing with this last night and here’s what it lets you do – initiated by pressing and holding the Windows key on the phone or, if connected, your dial button in the car
- call people using your voice and specify which number by saying things like “call Richard, mobile”
- find stuff in Bing by saying phrases like “find weather in London” or “find coffee nearby” (it uses your current location to determine nearby)
- open programs by saying “open maps” or “open angry birds”.
and my favorite
- text people by saying “text” followed by the person’s name. You’re then asked to speak your message and our Tellme cloud service gets to work, translates your voice in to text and if you’re happy, you say “send” and off it goes. my tests proved this to be pretty accurate though I’ve not tested thoroughly in the car so your mileage may vary. Oh and as Alex says in the Phone team blog, you can say things like LOL to your Mango phone and it knows what you mean.
I’m still getting used to having my car read text messages back to me but it does that too. What may take some getting used to is my daughter sending texts on my behalf. Surely that’s only days away 
