Microsoft Makes Windows Phone Voice Recognition Twice As Fast And 15% More Accurate Than Before

2 min. read

Published on June 17, 2013

published on June 17, 2013

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Microsoft Bing team today announced that they have rolled out updates to Windows Phone users, to improve the speed and accuracy of voice to text and voice search. Bing will return results twice as fast as before and increase accuracy by 15 percent!

Over the past year, we’ve been working closely with Microsoft Research (MSR) to address limitations of the previous voice experience. To achieve the speed and accuracy improvements, we focused on an advanced approach called Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). DNN is a technology that is inspired by the functioning of neurons in the brain. In a similar way, DNN technology can detect patterns akin to the way biological systems recognize patterns.

By coupling MSR’s major research breakthroughs in the use of DNNs with the large datasets provided by Bing’s massive index, the DNNs were able to learn more quickly and help Bing voice capabilities get noticeably closer to the way humans recognize speech. We also made a few improvements under the hood that allowed Bing to more easily identify speech patterns and cut through ambient and background noise – cutting down response time by half and improving the word error rate by 15 percent, even in noisy situations.