Voice recognition may enter the mainstream in 5-6 years”

Ashim Jaidka, director, Embedded Software Group, Microsoft, talks to Prashant L Rao about the company’s plans for Windows Mobile, its upcoming Portable Media Centre platform that aims to do for video what the iPod did for audio

l The upcoming Portable Media Centre (PMC) has impressive specifications—up to 600 hours of audio, 175 hours of recorded TV or 100,000 photos on a 40 GB hard drive. What’s the target segment for this gadget and by when will it be out?

Test runs of the PMC are on right now. OEMs are aiming for a Christmas release (which means PMCs will be in the market from October). The PMCs I’ve seen are pocket-sized. You can make them smaller but the PMC is aimed at all media. If you look at digicam sales, there’s a lot of digital content being created. The next thing people will want to do is get it on their PCs, take it with them, and share it with friends. Disc prices are going to come down over time. The first generation of PMC-like devices cost between $500 and $600…Windows-based second-generation PMCs should cost less than that.

Are we going to see a lot of handhelds with WiFi support this year?

There are several Pocket PCs on the market that support WiFi. These include the HP iPaq 5500, 4300 and 4100, the Dell Axim X3I, and the Toshiba e750 and e800. All these have integrated WiFi. The Pocket PC platform supports both WiFi and GPRS, and a Pocket PC device can automatically switch from one protocol to the other.

Can WiFi-enabled handhelds compete with entry-level notebooks or sub-notebooks in emerging markets such as India and China?

You can get some basic level of functionality [with a WiFi-enabled handheld]. It depends on the type of application you want to run. For basic word processing you have PocketWord on the Pocket PC. That said, a sub-notebook is a PC, and they are almost as small as handhelds. Today you get $600 notebooks.

Is any of Microsoft’s OEM partners planning a sub-$300 Pocket PC aimed at the Indian market?

[If you look at the] Pocket PC as a mass-market device, price is a barrier. We see a lot of hope in new channels. Cellular operators are bundling Smartphones with their plans. Motorola has a Smartphone on the Indian market [The Motorola MPx200 Smartphone].

Is voice recognition going to be a mainstream feature on handhelds within the next two-three years? You already offer voice commands but that’s simpler to implement.

We also offer voice recording [in addition to voice commands]. WAV files are used to record voice on both the Pocket PC and Smartphone. A one-minute voice recording takes up approximately 100 KB of storage. This is a very exciting technology and Microsoft is investing a lot in voice recognition. It is a challenging technology that involves understanding different accents and languages. You have to make sure that people’s experiences with voice recognition is positive. Maybe in five to six years we’ll see it entering the mainstream.

Where are Microsoft’s embedded platforms heading?

We have Windows Mobile and Windows Embedded Windows CE has 400 components that developers can pick and choose to create an OS. It runs on ARM, x86, MIPS, SH-3 and SH-4 (Hitachi’s Windows CE-compatible SuperH family of processors). Windows XP Embedded is bigger than Windows CE, but the embedded image can be as small as 50 MB.