14 DAY TRIAL // Owners of Windows Phone devices in the United States now have an updated feature to enjoy on their handsets, as Microsoft decided to make the voice recognition capabilities of the platform faster and more accurate than before.
Apparently, the company has been rolling the updated capabilities to its users in the past few weeks, for an enhanced experience when taking advantage of voice search and voice-to-text.
According to the company, the improvements made to voice recognition will make the aforementioned two features twice as fast as before, while also offering 15 percent increased accuracy.
“If you’re using a Windows Phone in the US, you may have noticed that the voice capabilities on your phone have gotten better,” The Bing Speech Team notes in a blog post.
“Over the past few weeks, we’ve been rolling out updates to Windows Phone customers, to improve the speed and accuracy of voice to text and voice search. Now when you compose a text message or search using your voice, Bing will return results twice as fast as before and increase accuracy by 15 percent.”
The company also explains that the update arrives as the result of the collaboration with Microsoft Research (MSR), and that their work was focused on an advanced approach called Deep Neural Networks (DNNs).
After pairing research breakthroughs in the use of DNNs with datasets provided by Bing’s massive index, the DNNs could help Bing voice capabilities near the manner in which humans recognize speech, the team explains.
“We also made a few improvements under the hood that allowed Bing to more easily identify speech patterns and cut through ambient and background noise – cutting down response time by half and improving the word error rate by 15 percent, even in noisy situations,” said blog post continues.
You can learn more on the updated features in the video embedded below. Unfortunately, no details on the availability of the update for Windows Phone users outside the US have been provided as of now.