IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

In Jon Stewart's interview with Bill Gates (clip found at comedy central), Gates is asked if his original vision for computer has been realized, and he responds with some pointed examples. One such example refers to the ability to speak with a computer.

In the segment of the interview before the break, he speaks to security as being a major focus for Windows Vista.

Perhaps the irony is not lost on those of you that have read the reports of a security flaw in the voice recognition capability of Windows Vista, a flaw that rather easily allows a random voice playing out of your speakers to do malicious things to your system, such as delete your photo archive or your tax return.  George Ou suggests an easy fix, but there is no word on whether it will be implemented or not.

At present time, Vista Speech Recognition wakes up to the command "start listening". How hard would it be for Microsoft to make that a
user-definable phrase or word; For example: A user would pick "Zelda" as the word to wake speech mode while someone else picks "439" as their wake word.  How hard would it be for Microsoft to implement a wake timeout so that Speech Recognition would sleep after 5 minutes idle? How hard would it be for Microsoft to implement their excellent echo cancellation algorithm in Windows Messenger for Speech Recognition? I don't believe this is too much to ask.

That's an easy fix, but the better fix is for the computer to not only recognize what I say, but identify my voice and only accept commands from me. Idenfication by password is a low-tech way of identifying I'm authorized to give commands to my computer, but the high-tech flavor of actual voice identification would be much harder to crack.

Microsoft Tech Support says not to worry about this little problem, but I for one will make sure all the voice recognition features are disabled after I install Vista next week, and I recommend you do the same.

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