The voice-enabled remote control may become one of those 10 year+ overnight successes. The definition of success may be the question, as adding this piece of hardware as part of the user interface ecosystem may have far-reaching impacts beyond the obvious benefit of finding better content and finding it faster. In the above video, filmed at NCTA’s 2013 Cable Show, Comcast’s Ross Gibson provides a brief overview of Comcast’s XR11 voice-controlled, remote control.
Things that make this different, as compared to eight years ago, when Comcast initially tested this type of solution:
- Thanks to Apple’s Siri and Google Now, consumers are familiar with speaking to devices and seeing/hearing the search results.
- Costs have come down – from the cost of WiFi to bandwidth to local and cloud computing power, the costs to implement such a service have become a non-issue. The app ecosystem allowed Comcast to roll-out and test this capability at virtually no-client cost for those customers with smartphones and tablets.
- Capabilities & quality have gone improved – The input and response time for searches by voice are faster than what can be done with a keyboard. Its rejection of noise is amazing, as shown in the above demonstration filmed on the noisy trade show floor
The XR11 voice remote digitizes the voice commands (look closely and you can see Gibson talking to the remote control) and transmits them via WiFi to Comcast’s cloud where natural language commands are converted to search results and returned to the set-top or gateway.
The set-top also provides a synthesized voice read out of the search results (listen carefully to hear the search results in the above video). Although, designed for the 20% of households that has, as Comcast’s Brian Roberts suggested at NCTA’s 2013 Cable Show, at least one member with accessibility issues, these features could become important for any viewer (just as captions have become important for all viewers in noisy environments).
One representative of a remote control manufacturer seemed surprised and somewhat skeptical of the adoption of voice remotes, based on his company’s consumer testing of this sort of technology several years ago. Other skeptics may suggest people would prefer to use their smartphones or tablets; and that may be the case for some people. There will also be people who prefer the simplicity of the remote control; a single-purpose device dedicated to the input part of the big screen’s user interface. (e.g. the phone is charging and not handy or the a hassle of changing apps).
Although pricing wasn’t discussed, one has to think that in the long-term, voice recognition capability will become a standard feature in all remotes. By having a user input device like this in the hands of the consumer, Comcast opens up a world of possibilities for new applications beyond video search, such as:
- Voice commands of Comcast’s other services, such as smart home and security management, bridging silos and making it easier to use these services (e.g. “Turn off bathroom light”).
- Enhanced customer support calls via natural language input with both electronic or human agents on the other end.
- Voice communications (with or without video) to other people via the remote control.
Indeed, the voice remote may be the Trojan Horse for a mini-ecosystem of applications that could make what still may seem like a novelty nice-to-have into a must-have feature.
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