Voice control on Xbox One actually works and it seems to be genuinely useful. It should be faster than using the joypad for certain functions, but ideally you'd use both in concert. And as for Xbox's isolation from the rest of the components in your system, that is now clearly a thing of the past.
"It'll work with any TV, any amplifiers. It'll work with any AV equipment at home," says Xbox director of product planning Albert Penello. "When we say 'Xbox On' we can actually light up your whole entire system and control everything just with voice."
With full system integration, voice control comes into its own. Penello likens Xbox One's incorporation with your equipment to the Harmony universal remote, except that your voice is the key. You can walk into your lounge and your voice powers up everything: you won't need to reach for your remote or Xbox controller, you won't need to use multiple doobries to access each part of your system. Two words and you're up and running. Xbox One is always on. Even in its low-power sleep state, it should fully reactivate before your HDTV gets around to displaying its image. From a dashboard perspective at least, the days of waiting around for your console to boot should now be a thing of the past.
For this technology to work effectively, three things need to happen. First of all, Kinect's voice recognition tech has to just work - no mean feat considering the amount of languages supported, and the range of accents to accurately process. Secondly, Xbox One needs to know exactly what equipment is in the room in order to speak their own individual infra-red based languages. And finally, and perhaps most crucially, the IR signals that emanate from the console always need to register with the target hardware.
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Integration with your home system comes via a simple set-up procedure, but Penello's instructions are clearly making their way through to the TV he has set up in the presentation room. And it's all happening without any kind of traditional IR blaster visible in the room.
"Xbox mute. Xbox unmute. Xbox volume up. Xbox volume down."
"That's not going through wires," says Xbox group manager of corporate PR, David Dennis. "That's Kinect blasting the infra-red codes to the TV, the TV picks it up and that's the TV UI changing."
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But what is impressive is that every voice command registered by Kinect is flawlessly transmitted to the relevant kit in the room. It works so well because Kinect itself is the IR blaster. Microsoft has augmented the new Kinect sensor with an IR transmitter in order to see the environment even in pitch black conditions. The upshot of this is that the technology works by drenching the entire room in infra-red light. Forget little LEDs attached to wires you dangle in front of your set-top box; if that's an IR blaster, the Kinect solution is effectively the equivalent of going nuclear. Debug Kinect tools allow you to see what the IR sensor sees - complete blanket infra-red coverage of the whole room. It's hard to imagine a scenario where this form of IR blasting wouldn't work.
