Windows Phone 8 supports speech recognition in 15 languages including Indian dialects
By Nehul Gupta
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Windows Phone 8 may look and feel very similar to Windows Phone 7.5, but in actuality there are number of changes that range from the new start screen, to the shared core with Windows 8 and every other day new features keep propping up. Microsoft is touting yet another improvement in its mobile OS with its improved language support. In a blog post, today Microsoft claims that the Windows Phone 8 on-screen keyboard works across 50 languages and it’s speech recognition works with 15 languages and it even supports the Indian accent.
Microsoft says that improved language support was the number one feature that customers had asked for and from the 22 languages supported in Windows Phone 7.5, the support has gone up to 50 in Windows Phone 8. Additionally, the 15 languages supported by the speech recognition software in the platform include Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India (English), Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States, which makes it a truly global platform.
In comparison Apple’s Siri does a very poor job of recognizing the Indian dialect in the process it is rendered useless for most Indians. Google’s Voice search works much better and is quite accurate, but we cannot say if it’s better than Microsoft’s solution or not.
