• Diyan
• On June 18, 2014

Passive listening feature coming to Cortana Windows Phone assistant

Microsoft’s phone assistant is currently activated by pressing down the microphone icon after launching the program through search key or Live Tile. Windows Phone Area understands that Microsoft is working on an alternative way for enabling Cortana – through passive voice commands. The so-called ‘passive voice activation’ is already available on Kinect’s Xbox One.

This passive voice listening would be similar to Google Now allowing users to activate the phone assistant by saying ‘OK Google’. Once the assistant is awake you will be able to make appointments, create notes, play music and much more.

The voice activation will probably work only for smartphones with Snapdragon 800 or higher processors as the older models don’t have enough hardware capacity to support “always on” microphones. Marcus Ash, Windows Phone’s program manager explains that the voice activation is in the works and the team is now trying to overcome difficulties with speech recognition and ambient noise.

Source: Neowin