MiPad is the first demonstration application designed to show off the "Dr. Who" interface technology under development by Microsoft Research. Dr. Who combines speech recognition and spoken-language processing into a single interface.
My device, your pad
"Gates wants to empower people to access information anywhere, any time on any platform," explains X.D. Huang, senior researcher with the speech technology group, Microsoft Research. "This is part of his NGWS (Next Generation Windows Services) vision."
Once cell phone and other wireless standards become more prevalent, Microsoft could deliver a version of MiPad on a variety of devices, such as cell phones and wrist watches, officials say. On the back end, all the relevant data would be stored on a server, in Microsoft's view.
Not any time soon
"We are advancing the technology rapidly," he said. The speech group "has transferred lots of technologies to the Microsoft product groups."
Based on this track record, Huang said, MiPad is more likely than not to find its way into some type of Microsoft product. He added that a sister group, Intelligent Interface Technologies (which Microsoft spun out of Microsoft Research a few years ago) already is adding a speech-interface technology to a number of Microsoft products, including future Office releases and Microsoft Phone, due to ship over the next two to five years.
During his keynote speech in Miami on Tuesday, Gates explained MiPad (pronounced "my pad") this way: "MiPad will be a future form factor of a wireless device. ... What MiPad will do is integrate the ability of e-mail, calendar, contacts, all the things Windows CE does, with a high speed wireless connection; so I can do voice over it, I can do phone calling, I can anything I would normally want to do with a PDA. ... And the nice thing about MiPad is it will be voice activated."
If Microsoft does take MiPad commercial, when would users likely see the first deliverables? Huang would not say when this technology might emerge from the labs.
