Windows 11 could see big push for voice commands in latest developer update

In the Windows 11 Insider preview, Microsoft has announced that its upcoming operating system will see multiple voice access features that will help people control their PC and author texts using their voice. Some of the use cases include opening and switching between apps, basic web browsing or even authoring emails.   

“Voice access leverages modern, on-device speech recognition to accurately recognise speech and is supported without an internet connection,” said Microsoft in a blog post.   

The voice access, in its beta test version, will be available if the language is set to US only, and can be initiated after downloading a speech model for on-device speech recognition.   

To get voice access to start listening, users can say “unmute” or voice “access wake up”.   

Some of the voice access commands include searching on a browser, where a user has to just say “search on Google chrome for books”, or just “open music player” to open an application.   

Also read: Microsoft launches Windows App SDK to boost app creation for Windows 11

Voice commands can also be used to navigate screens, such as scrolling in a specific direction, or even move a slider to a direction by a certain distance. Other use cases include text dictation, controlling mouse and keyboards, editing texts, navigating texts, and could also be used to insert commas, punctuations and symbols.   

Windows 11, which was released on 5 October, will receive these voice updates in the near future, along with spotlight collection backgrounds, which showcases different entities on the lock screen, and an updated entry point for widgets, where a widget icon will appear on the left side of the screen, clicking on which will showcase multiple widgets for weather, stocks and calender.   

The features are now available to developers, and are called as the Windows “11 test build no.22518”. The updates should be generally available sometime next year.