Forget the touch. Just talk.

There is no doubt that apple, with its touch technology, has raised the bar very high for the mobile phone industry. I am sure many of it competitors are still spending sleepless nights. Other players like HTC & LG had come up with their version of touch technology but definitely not surpassing apple. Ofcourse, apple will always have the early bird advantage.

It seems that people are exploring ways other than touch to impress customers. That is what Microsoft exactly did. They come up with a voice command interface to control the mobile phone. While this is not new to the mobile phone industry, the set of features offered by this new software are much more superior to what was already seen.

Earlier, many mobile phone vendors offered what is commonly known as "voice dialing". To be able to do that, a voice tag has to be associated with a particular contact. Then only one would be able to dial that contact using voice. But now, with Microsoft’s "voice command" software, there is no need to tag each contact. You just say the name. The software identifies the corresponding contact and asks you for confirmation before dialing. If you say “yes” it would dail that number or else if you say “no” it would try to find the next closest match. It uses something called speaker independent phonetic speech recognition and text-to-speech technology.

This is nothing compared to hell lot of others features offered by this software. It can be used for e-mail notifications, spoken caller ID, controlling media player, controlling utilities, calendar lookup etc. It can be used to quickly check the time, date, and battery level also. See this link from Microsoft to see the feature list or even better, see the software in action in this video.