Did you know Windows 9 will be voice controlled only?

  • Article

Yesterday an early Alpha of Windows 9 was released on the corporate network and I couldn’t resist installing it. I started up the installation, which went very smoothly by the way, filled in the necessary details, clicked “Finish" and left it running overnight. When I arrived this morning a friendly Power Shell-window was greeting me asking me to calibrate the voice control.

Working with Voice control

After less than 90 minutes of training I was able to open notepad and highlight a section of text which was very exciting.

I wasn’t the only one who’d leapt at the opportunity to run the Alpha, so there were quite a lot of us shouting commands at our computers which caused quite a ruckus at times. It was quite impossible to keep a normal conversation over the phone with people shouting “New Paragraph!” and “Dear Mom!” left and right. Still, that’s the price you pay for being an early adopter I guess.

The decision to use voice command (VC) only is definitively a brave move, but I think it’s the right way to go. People have been generally hesitant to use the VC features of Vista, but I think that’s mainly due to the lack of support. Forcing developers to think outside the box and adapt their software for this new means of control is definitively the way of the future. Just like Nintendo demands that developers adapt to their unorthodox controller for the Wii, I’m sure Microsoft will start a new era in computer software with this revolutionary step.

After only 90 minutes I was able to highlight text in Notepad.

Other cool features

Apart from the VC there were a lot of other cool features that I really enjoyed.

Xbox 360 emulator

The next Windows will ship with a complete Xbox 360 emulator. It is basically a tweaked version of Virtual PC that allows you to run console games on your PC. I fired it up and played a little Halo 3, but I must say I was a bit disappointed. The voice control needs additional working on. It quickly got tiresome yelling at Master Chief and my cries of “go forward”, “go forward”, “fire”, “turn around”, “left”, “left”, “fire” and “reload” made it quite hard for me to disguise to my boss what I was doing. One of my colleagues had just picked up a case regarding twelve crashed IIS-servers and an on-line banking application. He was on the phone trying to sort the situation out and started giving me dirty looks after a while. I also must add that the whole Xbox-live experience was somehow diminished. The usual chatter was sadly missing since we were all so busy shouting directions. Still, it’s only an alpha, so I’m certain these things will be addressed.

Boss key

Another nice addition that also seems to heir from the Home Entertainment Division is a boss key. It's really quite surprising that we had to reach the 9th installment of Windows before this was introduced. All I had to do was say "Hi boss" and the screen would immediately present a blue-screen. This is useful in more ways than one. Not only does it quickly hide your Halo 3 session from view, but it also gives you a reasonable explanation as to why your productivity has been somewhat lacking. It's a pure stroke of genius.

On one occasion it turned out that the alpha had blue-screened for real due to some conflict with my graphics driver. It took me almost 15 minutes to realize this after having spent several fruitless attempts trying to wake it up from boss mode. :)

Release date

From what I've heard the planned release date is April 1st 2009, exactly one year from now.

 

/ Johan

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2008
    Love April fools day ;) Almost had me with it too, the boss key was just way too much.

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2008
    Oh, April Fools day... nice try :)

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2008
    Sweet mother of g0d, they must be joking. I work in an open plan office. AND I WRITE CODE I DO NOT SPEAK CODE!!!!!!! PLEASE PLEASE TELL ME WHERE I CAN PROTEST! I HATE voice control, I don't like speaking to PEOPLE as much I like typing things to them, I do NOT WANT TO BE FORCED TO SPEAK TO MY COMPUTER.  

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2008
    Oh. YOU BASTID. Didn't read the boss key thing.

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2008
    Hi Johan, Nice to have you in the Alpha team for windows 9. I will talk to the Dev team that the Boss key function will be postponed to SP1 /Rolf (Your Boss)

  • Anonymous
    January 17, 2009
    I seriously hope this is a joke

  • Anonymous
    June 22, 2009
    to Scott who comment above...APRIL FOOLS IDIOT have a good day

  • Anonymous
    July 03, 2009
    Windows Vista can already run on voice command, type speech on search and you will find speech recginition

  • Anonymous
    July 19, 2009
    some year ago  myself also thought for an operating system which is controled by voice command, but now it came in relaity and that really suprise me.

  • Anonymous
    July 19, 2009
    this operating system not perform properly because its voice controlled so many time cause problem

  • Anonymous
    August 13, 2009
    : ( I didn't realize it was a joke until i read the comments.

  • Anonymous
    December 18, 2009
    I'd like to be able to speak to my computer like they do on the Enterprise in Star Trek TNG. Can we have that in Windows? I'd like to be able to say "Transfer to Engineering", et Voila!, your desktop switches automatically to a remote desktop seemlessly. Oh, I also like the computer voice in ST:TNG. Imagine the responses, like "Access Denied", "Unable to Comply", or how about "Device Connected and Ready."  Go further. Imagine SQL Server providing computer voice responses to let you know when a server is down, along with instructions on how to remedy a problem. C'mon, computers are supposed to simplify things and give us back our time. Cheers, from Canada.

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 05, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2010
    april 1 2010 and they still havent gotten it finished... prolly cuase they are gonna steal the eye controlled pointer from mac os mutated snow cheeta which was stolen from geyes a gnome desktop project

  • Anonymous
    June 21, 2010
    OMG i dont like the idea tha they made :/

  • Anonymous
    August 09, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    December 11, 2010
    Thought you were being serious! Haha didn't even realize it was posted on April Fools Day until now. :) Do you really have Win9 though?

  • Anonymous
    February 14, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2011
    @everyone who reads the above poster's comment, learn from it. Trying to hard fails

  • Anonymous
    April 17, 2011
    Mmmmm this is not fake guys, I have windows 10 at home

  • Anonymous
    December 16, 2011
    this is  a new creation of science

  • Anonymous
    December 20, 2011
    DON'T LIE. 1 April 2008 is April Fool's Day. At that time not even Windows 7 beta is released. And you are already talking about Windows 9 alpha. Now which is more than 3 years later, Windows 8 beta is only about to be released. Windows 9 will only come out on 2015. Please, lying is no good.

  • Anonymous
    February 17, 2012
    Wow...I love it. Windows 9 with Voice control. Now on-wards i should start singing, then what happens to my typing skills.

  • Anonymous
    March 11, 2012
    I think what you really meant by "Windows 9" was Windows 7.

  • Anonymous
    September 06, 2014
    Microsoft may introduce Cortana on Windows 9, and can be launched by the end of this September. www.cyberkendra.com/.../windows-9-to-be-introduce-on-september.html