Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie has been ridiculed elsewhere for suggesting that Tellme is his company’s answer to Apple’s Siri. Nonetheless, there is more than a little bit of truth to his assertion. As illustrated in this “concept video” which Microsoft issued in August 2011, researchers at Tellme and the Speech at Microsoft Group were vectoring toward a voice interface that understood a mobile subscribers intent and vectored her toward transactions (warning: Silverlight required). Alas, the vision is not quite reality, as shown in this “side-by-side” comparison.

As speech geeks (like me) know, such an uncontrolled experiment is basically unfair. In these cases, the noise created as one phone presents an audio response to a spoken question is destined to confound the other device’s ability to carry out its task. But even if the Windows Phone 7 running Tellme failed to perform tasks with the same proficiency as Siri, just sharing the screen with the iPhone 4S was a marketing coup. It also set the stage for a set of product announcements that are destined to make Tellme and Speech at Microsoft top of mind during the holiday buying season.

This graphic from Microsoft’s Image Gallery illustrates how people can use their voices, in conjunction with an xBox 360, Kinect motion detection and Bing Search, to take command and navigate the growing variety of content offered through TV screens. The library or database of streamed content includes xBox 360 games as well as an online catalog of movies, sports events, television shows and music. Its current roster of contet providers/distributors include Hulu Plus, Last.fm, Netflix, Zune music and video and ESPN®. This content is offered through the broadband transport resources of AT&T U-verse® TV in the U.S., TELUS in Canada, BSkyB in the U.K., CANAL+ in France, Vodafone Portugal, VimpelCom in Russia and FOXTEL in Australia.

The full roster of TV and streamed fare is included in this press release, along with a timetable for roll-out of additional content and distributors in 2012, including Comcast’s Xfinity On Demand channels. All told, “nearly 40” TV and entertainment providers joined in the October launch announcement and will now be part of “customized, voice-controlled experiences to Xbox 360 systems.”

Microsoft is promoting voice command of the xBox in TV commercials and multiple advertising campaigns. It already claims 35 million members of xBox Live and has found that a significant percentage of them are already comfortable carrying out conversational interactions with other xBox Live members (as part of multiplayer games). Commanding to the console to find specific songs, programs, sports events or other entertainment is starting to feel more and more natural. Voice command for remote control TV has lured the likes of Promptu and Google into ill-fated initiatives, but Microsoft Kinect users have already had positive experience using both voice and gestures to command xBox games. Navigating and interacting with a broader set of content types and sources should be a natural. It should be much easier than scrolling through a video guide with hundreds of channels and a near infinite number of time slots.

For iPhone 4S users, Siri defines the new mobile user interface. It integrates automated speech recognition with resources for natural language understanding and supports a “short list” of common, mobile use cases. Its most prominent competitors for this role are Vlingo, Google Voice Action and more than a dozen mobile voice interface providers.

xBox Kinect will find that the mix of utility and entertainment ingrained in Tellme (along with Bing Search) has a chance to define the set of voice-enabled living room applications. Google will be there as well along with Apple, Logitech and a handful of others. Collectively, their efforts are making 2011-2012 to be the year that the voice user interface becomes acceptable for a multiplicity of “mainstream” activities.

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Tags: Microsoft, voice command, xBox