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The Voice Remote Control – A Trojan Horse in the Living Room

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:

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:

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.

One response to “The Voice Remote Control – A Trojan Horse in the Living Room”

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