But one key feature—one hot, relevant, rock-star-caliber feature—is conspicuously absent from the Windows 8 repertoire: Intelligent, semantically aware voice control is nowhere to be found in the new OS.
Image: Robert CardinSemantic voice control would have been a natural fit for a tablet-cum-computer like Surface RT.

iPads and iPhones have a voice dictation button built right into their virtual keyboards. And Google integrated its own set of deep voice control features into the Jelly Bean version of Android that was released earlier this year. So how come voice control isn't a forward-facing, marquee feature of Windows 8?

The short answer is that voice-control technology hasn't made it to laptops or desktops in a meaningful way for either PCs or Macs, and Windows 8, at least for the short run, is much more of a computer OS than a tablet OS.

In Windows 8 (as in Windows 7 and Vista), speech recognition remains relegated to the role of an “assistive technology” designed to help disabled customers use their PCs. The Windows Voice Recognition (WVR) feature in Vista and Windows 7 allowed users to control a few minor OS behaviors with their own voices, and users could also dictate text, all with varying degrees of success.

Relative to Windows 7, Windows 8 offers incremental accessibility improvements, but also demonstrates that there's no real desire on Microsoft’s part to make voice control a major feature of the OS. Windows 8 can recognize your voice if you're using a microphone and can carry out some simple commands, but it doesn't offer anything approaching the voice-controlled "personal assistant" experience that we find in Apple's Siri.