Bill Gates Keynote

I'm writing this from the combined Microsoft MDC/VSLive/AVIOS-SpeechTEK conference in San Francisco. What these three shows have to do with each other is something of a mystery to me, but here we are anyway. Bill Gates will be giving his opening keynote address in a few minutes. This will be the first time I've seen Gates speak in person, and I'll record some of my impressions as we go.

In general, I'm not a big fan of the Rock-Star Business Executive Keynote Address. They tend to be long on flash, and short on substance, and let's face it--there are some people who are very smart and successful, but shouldn't be treated like U2.

I'm here for the AVIOS/SpeechTEK conference, which is focused on speech recognition, so I'm not especially interested in the content of Gates' speech, more just to hear the Great Man speak. The other 5,000 attendees are here for Microsoft's stuff. I feel a little subversive, sitting in the giant hall (I estimate it seats about 5,000) typing on my Apple Titanium Powerbook. I keep looking around, expecting someone wearing a suit with an earphone to tap me on the shoulder at any moment. "Excuse me, sir," he'll say, "I'll have to ask you to come with me. Your laptop is causing a disruption in the hegemony." Of course, our booth also features two flat-screen iMacs--chosen not because of any anti-Microsoft message, but simply because they're total eye candy for geeks.

In the room, there are young women circulating dressed as 1950's-style flight attendants, and another group dressed as supermodel/hookers. Doesn't Microsoft realize how offensive this is in 2004? Probably not.

The first ten rows of the hall are reserved for Microsoft people. Built-in cheering section.

There's a mercifully brief introduction, and a short rock riff, and Bill Gates arrives. I can understand why he's beloved of geeks everywhere: he's one of them. Today's another Bill Gates Bad Hair Day, and he doesn't come across as the most polished or comfortable public speaker. On the other hand, he appears to be speaking completely extemporaneously, and he's clearly very bright.

Okay, someone get that man a speaking coach. With 5,000 people in the room, his body movements are very restrained, he spends most of his time with his hands clutched in front of his chest, every fourth word is "um" or "uh," and he just used his pinkie to pick earwax from his ear.

He's still talking about history and background. Moore's law, Internet access is getting faster, and his wristwatch has more power than a Cray-1.

Now showing a very funny pseudo-commercial featuring a kitchen full of wires, electronics and a USB toaster. Bill Gates cheers (in the ad) as the toaster successfully produces Microsoft Office enabled toast.

Clearly, this is a company which knows how to poke fun at itself.

Oops. Forgot to silence my cellphone. Set mobile devices to "stun."

He's talking about new developer tools. Code checkers, a took to make sure an application doesn't need to run in admin mode, etc. Major paradigm shift in error reporting. Gathering data bout why applications crash, and whether people find help helpful. These are all Good Things, but of course developers need to do something with the data to actually improve the applications.

Gates goes offstage now, so someone else can give a demo of Visual Basic 2005. Jay Roxe is the speaker now, and he's clearly been given more coaching than Gates. He's also really young. He's showing off building a simple application in Visual Basic.

He got ahead of himself, and started speaking before the application was finished building. Looooooong pause.

Gates is back. Mentions that Visual Basic 2005 will be released in the first half of 2005, so the product is still a year or more away. Now we're on to mobile applications. Microsoft wants to make applications trivial to port to mobile devices like cellphones, PDA's, etc. The trend, according to Gates, is to combine the best of phones and PDA's in a single device. Someday, there will be one device which combines 3G mobile phone and WiFi PDA (no mention of what the size or battery life will be).

He's claiming that Microsoft has growing share of the mobile phone market, and the biggest market share in the enterprise. I'm not quite sure what that statement means, but I'm skeptical. Now the announcement is Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition. He seems to be stumbling a bit trying to remember the new features of this software. Now showing off a Motorola smartphone, but he's not actually showing it do anything (just "gee, neat keyboard").

Another demo, by Ori Amiga, who is also a better speaker than Gates. He's going to develop an application for his smartphone to make blog entries. Nice demo, works well on his mobile phone, but when he tries to show off his Pocket PC, it gets stuck on a reminder that he's going to speak at this keynote. After a couple of mailed attempts to make it work, he gives up. However, making a photoblog entry from his application is successful (though it appears the app itself was precompiled before the keynote).

Gates is back again, and now he's going to talk about speech. This is the part of the conference I'm here for.

"Smart people have been working on speech for decades," he states, and I won't disagree. More speech-capable devices, better accuracy. But computers can't understand context to resolve ambiguity, and they're not good at eliminating noise. Interesting that he's talking about the technical problems only, and not the human-factors problems--which tend to be killers in building real-world speech recognition applications.

Announcing a new speech server, and Microsoft is very committed to speech. He expects it to become more mainstream, especially in mobile devices. Talking about multimodal applications (speech plus keyboard plus mouse plus screen).

Scratching his head again. Bill Gates is clearly the Uber-Geek.

Now he's talking about telephony-based speech, which is a market Microsoft has been trying to crack for several years. We'll see if Microsoft is successful this time. Now for a demo by Richard Irving, who will show off the speech server. He's also a better speaker than Gates.

Irving is going to speech enable one of the earlier demos. Microsoft has developed a lot of really slick tools for taking an application and giving it a speech recognition interface (for example, for use over the phone), but my guess is that few people will develop good speech interfaces this way. Irving isn't paying any attention to the human factors issues, like writing clear and meaningful prompts, creating a grammar which includes things which real people will actually say, and so forth. There's some seriously deep domain expertise involved in writing a good speech application, and he's completely glossing over it.

As an aside, some of the worst call center applications I've ever seen are speech recognition systems written by people who thought it was easy. On the flip side, some of the best are speech recognition systems written by experts. By encouraging people to think speech is easy, the end result is most likely to be lots of really bad applications.

Gates is back for his wrap-up, but he's spending the most time talking about speech. Interesting.

And that's all she wrote. Conclusion: Bill Gates is very bright, but a terrible public speaker. But for us geeks, he's clearly One Of Us.

Update: I asked some of the Speech recognition people what their impressions, and the reaction was unanimous and can be summed up with something I overheard in the hall: "Bill Gates has shown us how easy it is to build shitty speech applications."