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Dr. Bill Crounse and Microsoft Healthcare and Life Sciences HealthBlog has highlighted an announcement that Windows Vista will have Speech Recognition by default for 8 languages. Dr. Counse even says:

Yes, speech recognition has been around for years…… but you’ve never seen anything quite like this. So to all you developers out there, my clinical colleagues are waiting for you. And now you have a better platform on which to build.

I wish that he would be more detailed in what he means by “you’ve never seen anything quite like this.” Having speech recognition built into Windows Vista is a great thing for healthcare IF it works well. It is currently built into Windows XP, but doesn’t work well enough for most doctors. Besides not having a medical dictionary, it just doesn’t work like what it is currently the market leader Dragon Naturally Speaking. This isn’t my personal opinion, but is the opinion of thousands of doctors who have tried it.

The question is whether I really think that Microsoft has spent enough money developing a superior voice recognition software. My initial thought is no. In fact, it kind of goes against their philosophy. Dr. Crounse asked developers to take Windows voice recognition and make it work for doctors. This is Windows business model. They want to provide a platform for other developers to develop. They don’t really want to develop it themselves.

I would say that I never believe in betting against Microsoft. They have too much money to call for the KO already. However, I have a feeling this might be their second knockdown in voice recognition. I hope I’m wrong, because I agree with Dr. Crounse that “Why should you be forced to spend a lot of extra money for a system that may not always work so well with the operating system and applications most people use?”

APOLOGY: I’ve been working on a very important post on Microsoft purchasing Azyxxi. I personally think the purchase is a very important move by Microsoft. Hopefully I’ll have that post ready soon. Sorry for the delay. Too bad I don’t get paid to blog.