Office 2007 Key Microsoft mashes up multiple natur

Publicly and privately,Office 2007 Key, Microsoft officials have already been generating a lot of the enterprise;s myriad multi-touch input assignments (especially with Windows 7 and Windows Cellular 7). But Microsoft;s see of what the user interface with the long term will look like is much more complex than that.Instead of allowing customers to interact only with touch or only with speech, Microsoft is functioning on interfaces that may combine multiple natural-input strategies. At final week;s Monetary Analyst Meeting, Microsoft officials showed off a demo of an automated front-desk receptionist, which the company plans to deploy internally later on this 12 months. The receptionist will make corporate-shuttle reservations, supply campus information and facts plus the like.(The automated receptionist, it turns out, is one of the fruits of a Microsoft Investigation energy, recognized since the “Situated Interaction project.” Microsoft officials are discussing that project at this week;s Study Faculty Summit, according to the agenda for the event, which kicks off on July 28. Other jobs upon which the Situated Interaction team is investigating include “multi-participant engagement and dialog models, conversational scene analysis, spatio-temporal trajectory reasoning, and behavioral modeling.”)Craig Mundie, Microsoft;s Chief Analysis and Strategy Officer, outlined some of Microsoft;s thinking during his keynote at FAM on July 24. Mundie told Wall Street analysts and press in attendance:“When people talk about a organic user interface, you know, we talk about handwriting and touch and speech and these things, but this is what a normal user interface is really going to be all about. And it won;t be just your receptionist. I mean, you should be able to come to computers and interact with them in a significantly far more natural way, to ask questions, have them respond to you to do tasks that are valuable to you. And I think this is just the tip with the iceberg, but it;s the first example built in a completely new way using these robotics technologies that we brought to the market two years ago. And so this isn;t really about just programming arms that assemble cars in the factory or creating things that run around hospital floors, this is in many ways the beginning of building very complicated interactive applications.”Mundie also showed off during FAM a demo I;ve seen before that combined a variety of natural-interface technologies — everything from facial recognition (which also is expected to find its way into the next version of Windows Live Photo ##############, by the way), to far more spatial recognition. (Guess that explains, at least in part, Microsoft;s recent decision to merge the PhotoSynth photo-stitching team using the Virtual Earth mapping one.)Mundie referred to the demo as an example of “first life” — which he described as “a mirror world of 3-D that everybody can participate in constructing and maintaining and which gives us a navigational metaphor that;s completely consistent with all the world we currently live in.”I have to admit, I am old-school when it comes to interacting with my PCs and devices: I like the keyboard. What about you? What kind of input are you hoping for with cell phones, ultra-light-weight PCs and laptops in the long term?