Hoping to spur adoption of speech recognition technology, Microsoft said Tuesday it has released a test version of a new development tool that lets software interact more easily with a human voice. Although speech recognition has been around for years and has seen limited adoption, Microsoft is betting that more powerful hardware and software means that the technology is ready to become a part of Web sites and business systems. With voice-enabled software, a typical computer user could perform tasks such as making an airline reservation by just by speaking the information.
Microsoft plans to release a test version of a software developer kit, or SDK, as an add-on to Visual Studio.Net, the recently released upgrade to its bundle of software development tools.
Microsoft will pay $1.33 billion for Danish software company Navision, the companies said Tuesday. Navision, which develops what is known as back-end software, helps companies manage business affairs such as human resources, accounting and customer relationships. It competes against software giants such as SAP and Oracle for larger enterprise customers, and against Microsoft's Great Plains division in the market for smaller and midsized accounts.
"Microsoft and Navision have had parallel lives, each with a deep belief in building long-term customer relationships achieved through lasting commitment to talented, value-adding partners," Microsoft Vice President Doug Burgum said in a press release.
A Microsoft executive told a federal court on Monday that he could not recall any changes the company had made to the multimedia features in the latest version of Windows, despite a stinging antitrust ruling against the company two years ago. While the design of Windows XP had been nearly completed by the time the appeals court issued its ruling, states' attorney John Schmidtlein demanded to know whether Microsoft had ignored the trial court ruling.
"Is it your testimony that Microsoft did not take into consideration at all the findings of the district court in this case?" Schmidtlein asked Poole. "We've certainly done our best to try to forecast where things (in the antitrust case) might go," Poole responded. Later, Poole said that other employees at the company might have made changes to the media player in Windows XP without his knowledge. "That could have happened or not happened," he said. "I couldn't tell you one way or the other."
AOL Time Warner failed to properly fix a security hole in its AOL Instant Messenger application, leaving its users vulnerable to a new way to exploit the same flaw, a security researcher said this weekend. The glitch's latest incarnation could have been just as dangerous as the previous version, publicized in January, opening the way for malicious AIM users to execute any program on a vulnerable user's computer, said Matt Conover, a hacker with a security research group known as "w00w00."
"This is almost identical to the problem we found originally, and that's saddening," he said. "By using a slightly different method, we are able to get around the filtering they used to protect against the last flaw."
Two Microsoft executives on Monday brushed aside allegations from rival RealNetworks that Microsoft uses its Windows operating system to gain an unfair advantage in music player programs. Richards objected to the "media bar" in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 Web browser, which can appear if a user clicks on a music file on a Web page. The media bar contains Microsoft's player. "The IE6 media bar is an integrated feature of IE6 that provides user value," Averett said. "As such, it is not replaceable by third parties." Averett said it is possible for RealNetworks to create its own media bar.
Microsoft says that if the media player was removed, the broad scope of the states' proposals would mean that Windows would not be able to play any sound or video at all - which would break many multimedia programs.
Google may have accomplished something that few in the technology industry can even boast of understanding: building a Web service that software developers can actually use. When Google recently opened its technology so that third-party developers of much-hyped Web services can tie in to the company's catalog of 2 billion documents, it signaled its intentions to amass significant interest in its search tools among software programmers.
What separates Google's Web services approach from those of larger technology companies is that the search specialist has attempted to inspire developers through a relatively simple tool: an API that lets a developer tap into its search franchise. Though most initial uses of Web services are being built by corporations and might solve esoteric problems the public may never know of or care about, Google has taken the Web services concept and made it real for the software development community--an enviable task amid rampant confusion over just what a Web service is supposed to be.
Microsoft's decision to withdraw Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and other witnesses from testifying in the ongoing antitrust trial may be part of a strategy to exploit a potentially devastating mistake made by the litigating states' attorneys. The software giant appears to be using the error to limit the amount of new evidence the states can introduce in the nearly 4-year-old case, legal experts say. The states could have used the testimony of at least three witnesses--Ballmer, Brock and Richard Fade, the Microsoft executive in charge of relations with OEMs--to, among other things, attack the legitimacy of a separate settlement the company made with the Justice Department and nine of 18 states. The states now have little recourse, after earlier failing to get pretrial depositions introduced into evidence.
After years of work and mounting pressure from cable companies, Microsoft recently decided to scale back its plans for complicated TV set-top boxes and develop the type of simple, interactive program guide that cable companies had been asking for all along. The result of this work--the Microsoft TV Interactive Program Guide (IPG)--was announced Monday morning at the National Cable & Television Association (NCTA) convention in New Orleans. And though it represents a humbling experience for the software giant, Microsoft feels that this version of its TV software will finally take off.
Whether you like Intel or not, you can't argue that the Pentium 4 of today is infinitely more competitive than what was launched a year and a half ago. But did we honestly expect any different? Intel received the same treatment at the launch of their P5 processors at 60/66MHz; competing solutions from AMD such as the 486 DX4-120 were much better buys and although they were running on an older 486 platform, they had more of an upgrade path than the soon to be forgotten 5V P5 processors. Remember the launch of the Pentium Pro? It has been said that until the Pentium 4, Intel has never released a processor that actually performed worse than its previous generation offering. With the majority of the applications back in 1995 written for 16-bit versions of Windows, the Pentium Pro's horrendous 16-bit application performance left everyone but a small percentage of users with a bad aftertaste.
Improved videoconferencing and online searching, plus a clever way to judge the value of newsgroups, are just three among hundreds of projects under way at Microsoft Research. Cutler built the RingCam, a circle of five or six inexpensive video cameras all pointed outward. It accomplishes technically difficult feats, like producing a single image and compensating for differences in the cameras' different color calibrations. Placed in the center of a room, it's the best way yet to broadcast a meeting. A version with eight cameras is planned.
Software developed for the RingCam lets it distinguish faces, which are important, from background, which isn't, and allocates less bandwidth to the background. That and similar techniques allow videoconferencing with just a DSL connection, not the costly T1 lines usually required, Cutler said.