First post on Tech IT Easy – introducing Vista’s funniest functionality

“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

Hi everyone,

First of all, it is a pleasure to start posting on this blog !

My first post will be rather humoristical. To begin with, I’ll just quote a BBC article:

“Microsoft has admitted that speech recognition features in Vista could be hijacked so that a PC tells itself to delete files or folders. Vista can respond to vocal commands and concern has been raised about malicious audio on websites or sent via e-mail. In one scenario outlined by users an MP3 file of voice instructions was used to tell the PC to delete documents.” (Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6320865.stm). 

Although exploiting this flaw won’t be so easy, just imagine how dangerous a video on YouTube could be thanks to Vista ! Rather scary, when you know the inventivity and the high skills of many hackers. Seems that Microsoft needs to hire smarter people…oh, sorry Jeremy !
Nevertheless, and more seriously, we should not overlook these speech-recognition functionalities. HMI’s (human machine interfaces) haven’t been overhauled since the introduction of the graphical interface by Xerox almost 30 years ago (although Apple was mostly credited for massively introducing this innovation ). Voice recognition technologies are now highly mature, and I am confident that once security issues are fixed, it will have a major impact. I do not expect the average user to spend his saliva by describing every single action. It is not very practical to say: “go to C://Documents And Settings/My Music, open My Music, launch Giuseppe Verdi – la Traviata.mp3″ !
However, I suppose that in a near future, users will smoothly use a combination of both interfaces. What about asking the computer to “Empty trash” while, unwilling to switch back to the Desktop, you manipulate a large file on Photoshop or playing Civilization …. A small gain of time ? Well, could be more…If you have time to waste, just try measuring your actual productivity in front of a PC. I mean the ratio between time spent and time actually working. Although it ought to be quite different between OS, I wouldn’t be surprised by a rather low efficiency on average. Of course, they will surely be various drawbacks to a “multi-access HMI”, but it might as well dramatically improve the above-mentioned ratio. Maybe these possibilities will end up by enhancing the intellectual abilities of next generation users (since they will now be able to deliver different instructions at the same time), and they will eventually improve the I.Q of us all. Or will they ?