Last week, Craig Mundie—Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer—told Forbes that he was not impressed with Siri, claiming that Microsoft has shipped similar technology in Windows Phone—via TellMe—for more than a year. He agreed with the reporter that much of Siri’s hype is “good marketing”, and that “Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for, you know, more than a year.” From the interview:

Both the iPhone and Windows Phones have shipped with speech-to-text converters for years, and were able to handle predefined voice commands. What sets Siri apart from previous attempts is its ability to understand natural spoken language.

TechAU decided to test Craig Mundie’s claims that Siri is no different from TellMe outside of marketing. What their demonstration shows us is more than Siri’s ability to understand natural language, but also how it excels at speech-to-text conversions:

Out of four requests, Microsoft TellMe was not able to correctly convert the speech-to-text once, whereas Siri performed flawlessly.