I’ve seen a number of references to a Microsoft demo of speech recog­ni­tion that went famously wrong, but it wasn’t until this evening that I finally watched the CNBC Video that started the meme.

A TV reporter makes a snarky in­tro­duc­tion then cuts to video of a Microsoft PM demoing the new speech recog­ni­tion technology in Windows Vista. Dear Mom comma, he says. Dear aunt, appears in Word. It gets worse from there. Funny stuff. Go watch the original video.

But it’s not the whole story. There’s another video which sets the demo in context. Overall, the demo was reasonably successful and the speech commands worked fairly well.

If you think people talking into their cellphones is annoying now, wait until you hear them talking at their computers!