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TV Industry Preparing for Voice Recognition Interfaces in 2012

implementing a feature, and implementing it *well* are two different things. my tv already has butchered versions of youtube, twitter, Facebook, dlna, and other features that sound good on paper but are too horrifically executed to realistically receive any heavy use.

if apple truly has something in the works, i don't think any attempts by others to beat them to the punch on rumoured features will yield much beyond rushed, clunky extrapolations of their own UI sensibilities.

and i don't mean that in a fan-boy-ish way. i want other companies to get it; but digging through nested, laggy, dos-like menus on a 2011 model tv doesn't inspire confidence that they're going to get this right on their first try.
 
Microsoft already has a couple years on apple in this field. Who is gonna want to pay double the current market price of tv sets when you can have the kinect for a few hundred with your tv current set up? Kinect is the 'real' innovation/ Apple will have to do a whole lot more than Siri on a luxury priced set to make this work..
 
So... Xbox does voice commands. While the TV is on, you can tell it to pause or fast foreward/rewind. It wouldn't be that much harder to add all sorts of voice commands. And it's not really gonna change anything. If anything, the Apple TV would be a "genius" sort of feature to TV shows that you watch. You like BattleStar Galactica? Try Star Trek.

Something like that. If it doesn't bring something new, it'll just be a "me too" product. And with millions of xboxes with voice commands already, all those people will look at Apple as a me too product... not good for Apple's image.
 
The problem with the single button mic remote (which was the solution I immediately thought of) is that the AI has to be perfect. Siri is great, I was in a new city today and walking around finding my hotel, starbucks for wifi, business meeting location and changing meetings around on the go was for the most part excellent, on the odd occasion siri didn't understand me or the background noise was too high I could use the regular interface.

TV can be (although a first world problem) urgent. Your team is on, the lets come x dancing with the american idols finale is on and you click the button tell the TV to turn over and it goes to Golf Channel, now what? Try again. Frustration.

Rage face.
 
Renzatic said:
Uh. Besides my example above, showing that voice recognition is far from a recent thing, Android already had a rather robust set of voice commands long before Siri showed up on the scene. .
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And there were mice before the mac, and mp3 players before the iPod and phones before the iPhone and voice recognition before Siri. We get it, when are you going to?
 
Ah yes, I can see this being popular with the people who stay at home all day:

"Siri, automate flipping through the channels and complaining about how many there are and yet nothing good to watch is on."
 
I'll freely admit that I'm as much of an Apple fanboy as anyone these days, but I'm not convinced that they're really going to be able to nail a true Apple TV in the way most are expecting.

Why?

It's simple: just listen to everything Steve Jobs has said about the whole idea in the past. There's just no easy way to bring the TV world together given the nature of the industry right now. I don't doubt that Apple's been trying for years and I don't doubt at all that they have some wonderful ideas that they could drop in an instant. I'd bet on them having numerous prototypes that they could bring to market in a matter of months if the situation was right.

But how in the hell do you get it to really play nice with a cable box from Comcast and a cable box from AT&T and an X-Box and a Blu-Ray player and a Wii? Like it or not, right or not, logical or not, annoying or not, absurd or not, that's the bottom line for the vast majority of television users, more so even for the higher end market who would likely be the early adopters if Apple can't put out a TV for under a grand.

So what can Apple really do? My guess is that any actual Apple HDTV that makes it to market will be a 1080P with what amounts to an Apple TV built in and some sort of system to beam a cable box to create better software that's more universal for commanding actual television watching. Also, simpler input switching for people's external devices. But obviously, in Apple's mind, this would be a TV focused more on streaming content, but the other matter at play here is content providers and data providers, and they're not going to make life easy on Apple despite what some people think.

So, while I'm totally ready and hoping to be blown away by ideas that I can't imagine (or I could, but don't see becoming a reality due to too many competing agendas outside of Apple's control), I think any Apple HDTV that makes it to market will be somewhat underwhelming to many people. Steve Jobs may have really "cracked it," but that doesn't mean Apple can just drop it on the market, and I think Steve knew that more than many seem to think. Again, I don't think he was BSing when talking about how difficult of an industry it was to break into, and I think there's a difference between knowing what needs to happen and being able to bring it to market in the current landscape.

And remember, for all intents and purposes, for Apple's biggest successes, they practically invented new categories with the iPhone ("truly" smart phone) and certainly defined a category that before lived in a never-ending state of infancy with the iPad (tablet) and iPod (digital music player) on some level. But TV is very, very different and it's just a far bigger mess than anything Apple's dealt with and they know that. The content providers are already at war with the data/service providers and Apple's set to be at war with both. How do you think that will play out given how easy it is to deal with them on anything else?

I'm hoping for the best, but I'm pretty happy with my Apple TV as is. It could be a lot worse.
 
ChrisTX said:
They're trying to beat Apple to the punch. They've sat back and watched Apple destroy Palm, Windows Mobile, and now RIM is in the ICU. They simply don't want to be next.
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I think its a misconception that Apple stormed the mobile phone market in a fit of conquest. It was necessary for survival. Give them credit for having the foresight to see that smartphones would render ipods obsolete and the ability to do it first before a competitor was able to get any initiative.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Apple wants other to beat them to the punch...they aren't trying to be first. Companies are setting themselves for failure, because they will release before Apple and Apple will learn from others mistakes and make their tv even better.
 
hollin said:
I think what I find most amazing (though I shouldn't be surprised) is how hard companies try to be like Apple, regarding stuff that is merely conjectured that Apple is doing.
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Apple is trailing in this arena, not leading.

xbox Kinect had voice control when it launched last November, and half a dozen TV manufacturers showed off some form of voice control in their TVs at this year's CES in January.
It's painfully naive to believe Apple is somehow the innovator in this technology.
 
I think there is more to it than just voice activation. I would bet that Steve had more to it like maybe hand motion activation. Wave the hand up and the channel changes to a higher channel. Down for the opposite effect. Microsoft already has similar interface with XBox 360.

What I am worried about is the TV industry beating Apple to the punch. Apple TV by 2013. From what I read in this post is that the industry is already working on most of the rumors we have read about. So will the Apple Television be too late?
 
nfl46 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Apple wants other to beat them to the punch...they aren't trying to be first. Companies are setting themselves for failure, because they will release before Apple and Apple will learn from others mistakes and make their tv even better.
Click to expand...

I think I figured out how to say what I'm getting at in an infinitely simpler way after reading this.

Basically...

There is no such thing as better until physical media and the standard television delivery systems are gone and everything moves to streaming over a much-improved national data infrastructure.

Expanding on that thought...

Another huge thing people keep forgetting is that most people have multiple TV's in the house. Some families have 3-4 or more that are oftentimes all watched at the same time. Streaming won't cut it at HD for the vast majority of people. Hell, my HD Netflix oftentimes struggled on a 30 Mbps down pipe when two people tried to run it at once, and most people don't have anywhere close to 30 Mbps download pipes in this country. The U.S. in particular is just not ready at all to go all streaming, all the time. It's kinda pathetic, but it is reality right now. And without an incredibly robust data network to handle 100% stream-based content, Apple has to learn to play nice with a whole lot of people trying to protect their own competing products. It's not an impossible task, but it really would take a miracle licensing deal and a miracle hardware-based interaction system to make something revolutionary that could elegantly exist in the current system.
 
The problem I have with the remote app for iOS is the delay between turning your device on and it connecting to my AppleTV. This makes it difficult to quickly pause what is playing to answer the door, phone etc. Any controller Apple come up with, voice activated or not, has to work as fast as an IR remote or it's going to get slammed IMO.
 
tylerk36 said:
I think there is more to it than just voice activation. I would bet that Steve had more to it like maybe hand motion activation. Wave the hand up and the channel changes to a higher channel. Down for the opposite effect. Microsoft already has similar interface with XBox 360.

What I am worried about is the TV industry beating Apple to the punch. Apple TV by 2013. From what I read in this post is that the industry is already working on most of the rumors we have read about. So will the Apple Television be too late?
Click to expand...

Have you every used a smart TV by anyone? They're all terrible. They've improved their interfaces aesthetically, but functionally, they're all still a disaster. LG was at least on to something with their Wii-like wand remote this last year; made navigating menus better, but it was far from perfect.

I really would love it if Apple really did crack this. I'd get one for my elderly Grandma on day one. She struggles way too much with the Comcast remote featuring a million buttons surely designed to enrage even the more competent users. It should never be that complicated. It's pathetic that it is. If they can make it simple enough for my Grandma, I hope they do it sooner rather than later, as she needs it more than ever lately.

----------
Mike Oxard said:
The problem I have with the remote app for iOS is the delay between turning your device on and it connecting to my AppleTV. This makes it difficult to quickly pause what is playing to answer the door, phone etc. Any controller Apple come up with, voice activated or not, has to work as fast as an IR remote or it's going to get slammed IMO.
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I completely agree with this.
 
Its the industry thats going to change

Voice control isn't really solving the problem that people have, and the example of making it easier to record something on a DVR falls into this trap, because when the industry is fixed you won't need a DVR.

I suspect Apple will improve the TV experience and have a spiffy new device for viewing. But the real possibility now is that Apple's enormous size makes it possible for them to move the entire industry away from channels and subscriptions and towards ala carte buying/renting programming directly (the iTunes model).
 
The solution is not Siri or voice

The problem with cable TV is not the remote control although it is really terrible. The problem is the multitude of possible input devices and the complexity of making what you want to appear on the screen.

The solution is to intelligently document the sources and present the user with the content in a simple interface that ignores the complexity. Voice controls seem really stupid in the face of the fact that it is the content that rules.
 
Are you serious? I think this is a horrible idea.

Why add useless functionality and additional complexity to a TV?

Am I the only person that finds this whole "voice recognition"/Siri fetish nothing more than a slightly amusing gimmick?
 
lfc said:
I like to call this, "The Apple Effect".
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Companies used to rush out and better their competitors released products. Now the companies rush out to better products Apple may or may not make and sell in the future.

This plays right into Apple's "don't do anything first but do it right" mantra. Let the competition screw it up. And Apple will fix up on their mistakes in their own products.
 
Voice recognition isn't what Steve was talking about when he said I cracked it. Voice recognition is a gimmick. Uncle Steve was talking about content.
 
Although, like others have said, voice recognition is not new - it didn't seem to be a big deal until Apple bought Siri. It's been on Android (and at times works surprisingly well), but no one seemed to talk about it much. When Siri was just an app, it was cool - but Microsoft and TV manufacturers didn't pay that much attention to the feature.

Now that Apple (and its PR machine) have Siri, everyone is falling over one another trying to announce a product with Siri-like features. I guess when a company is doing as well as Apple is, you have to expect others to imitate. I'm so used to Apple being the unique underdog that did things differently, that its now like being in the bizarro world with the tech world following Apple's every move.
 
Apple must be laughing its socks off!

A statement in a biography claiming to "have cracked it" and the whole TV industry is adjusting their 2012 goals to compete with it...

Kinda pathetic, not?
:rolleyes:
 
A little off topic but if/when Apple do release their TV's, I do hope they look a tad better than the outdated square excrescence shown at the top of this and other articles about :apple:TV .... ;)
 
Wow an entire industry is jumping over a tiny quote in Jobs bio. Even from the grave he is leading. They're all assuming its siri, it'd be funny if it's not. I figure it'd be closer to what is already there with appletv.
 
thejadedmonkey said:
If anything, the Apple TV would be a "genius" sort of feature to TV shows that you watch. You like BattleStar Galactica? Try Star Trek.

Something like that. If it doesn't bring something new,
Click to expand...
Tivo did that over a decade ago. Millions use it daily.

How many times do I have to post this?
 
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