The linked article comes at the technology on display from an Xbox One angle but I think it's bigger than that. Is Microsoft just highlighting it's vision for the Windows 8 world? Is it signalling that the future of Microsoft is going to be more bound up with hardware like the Xbox, Surface and Kinect? Biometrics in the OS? Taking it's huge market share and moving to a business model that looks more like Apple's?
More questions than answers, I know. But if you have 12 minutes, give it a watch and see if the same isn't true for you.
To touch on the biometrics a bit, it looks like the capability billed as voice recognition is indeed true voice recognition and speech recognition rather than speech recognition alone. A post dealing with the distinction is here. Each of the two people in the video tell the system to "show my stuff" and the software shows different sets of "stuff" even though prompted in identical terms by the different users.
I'm not exactly sure what the presenters mean when they mention that the system distinguishes among individuals by skeletal structure, but in the Skype demonstration the technology does seem to recognize a dog as something worth paying attention.
