Actually my windows phone 8 device (currently a circa 2013 820) isn't far off that already. Not joking. It goes:

1. Hold down start for 2-3 seconds

2. Say "Send text to Joe Bloggs"

3. Wait a couple of seconds for it to work it out.

4. Say your message. It gets this right nearly 100% of the time.

5. Asks you if that's ok or do you want to add some more

6. Say yes and it sends it.

It has an option to read and dictate texts to you as well but I've never used it as I think that would annoy me. Might go and play with it now.

You can do a fair bit with it. It can find a pizza place locally and call it without any trouble (my main use case :-)

Windows Phone devices already worked like that before Cortana. But in a more pre-scripted fashion. Something like -- "You've got a new message from Paul, read it or ignore?" -- Read it. And so on (including the dictation and sending of the reply)

That's not how I think of 'worked like that'. I have no interest in learning pre-scripted voice commands. Once you have everything scripted, implementing an interaction as I posted is almost as trivial as a CLI. That's why I put 'natural language' as the first criteria, which renders the second task a lot more challenging.

Watch the presentation:

http://channel9.msdn.com/?wt.mc_id=build_hp

It starts around 1:12:00

(And for people who don't want to watch: it appears, based on the demo, that it handles conversation flow dramatically better than Siri does, but I'll need to actually play with the real thing to know whether that's just presentation veneer.)

Wow, they're rolling this out globally next week.

I just recently switched back to Android (Motorola Razr Maxx) and will be switching back this weekend when I upgrade to the Nokia Icon. This latest update is coming out a lot sooner than I thought. Unreal.

Sounds very promising. If MS has cracked this problem, this could be a serious value proposition for Windows Phone, especially for the enterprise market they are finally going after. The new CEO, while certainly not responsible for starting these developments, seems to be focusing the company at pushing out the right kind of innovation.