Out of the many features that the Mango update will be bringing to the WP7 platform, text-to-voice has got to be one of the favorites at Redmond.

Mango Hear, Mango Write, Mango Also Read It Right

Now that Mango has a voice, it is only fitting that it comes with an ear as well. So not only will your Mango phone read out your text to you, it will also accept voice commands and do transcriptions for you.

Voice recognition is something that the two other smartphone biggies — Android and iOS — have been doing for some time. So in keeping with the view that Mango brings WP7 at par with them, this new feature definitely makes a lot of sense. Especially with everyone liking Google’s voice search within its many services.

Tellme Servers Under Heavy Load

Tellme is a team within Microsoft that handles the voice recognition development work and Alex Perez Avila from that team has said that the heavy lifting is done by the Tellme servers and not the phone. Hence the accuracy will not depend on the kind of hardware that the given instance of WP7 is running on.

Offloading the processing to the cloud makes perfect sense because voice recognition requires a pretty decent amount of processing of the tune that the average phone would not be able to handle very well. The only downside to this is however that it would require a decent data connection to upload and download the voice data.

Accessibility Now Easier Through Voice

Since voice commands are now available, it will also be integrated in to the system as part of the accessibility features in order to facilitate easier access to commands for those who need it the most.

A feature that was popular about a decade ago — attaching a voice tag to a contact on the phone — will be making a come back in a much sleeker way. Users will also be able to set up call forwarding through voice commands.

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