After a minor release hiccup, the new Xbox dashboard has been released for Xbox 360 owners around the world, bringing with it the ability to control the console with you horrible ocker accent. But how well does it work?
I played around with voice controls for the better part of an hour last night, and it worked well, for the most part. It almost always registered when I initiated the controls by saying “Xbox”, but there was a few occasions when I had to repeat myself a few times to get the Xbox to obey its commands. I did notice that there was a little bit of background noise during one of those occasions, which possibly could have caused the console to rebel against its master.
There were still the odd areas voice control wouldn’t work – I could use it to launch Twitter, but not Facebook, for example – but overall I was pretty impressed. I’m keen to see how well it integrates into iView and SBS On Demand later this month, but until then think I will probably use it pretty frequently.
How did everyone else find it worked? Did your Aussie accent pose any problems?
More: Aussie Preview With Kinect Voice And Zune Pass [Video]
James
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 10:06 AMIts cool but why cant I use the voice commands in DVD playback or when playing a video file from my PC? No reason why it shouldnt work. Microsoft just decide to leave it out. Not impressed by that.
Zacav
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 12:00 PMyep same for me. I don’t know why they left out the ability to be able to control music and movies that are being shared by a PC. Only Zune works which surprise surprise I don’t use
red t-rex
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 1:08 PM+1. I don’t see why they can’t extend it to control video files. Same goes for Media Centre. Apart from that it works really well. I was pretty impressed with it but I just don’t get how going in to some of these other areas are not part of the same interface. We get the felling they are disjointed apps cobbled together. This would be easy to understand if we got them from different vendors from an app store but these all come from Microsoft for goodness sake. Don’t these guys talk to one another?
Another opportunity missed by Microsoft to blow the competition away with something really impressive but instead it comes across as half arsed.
Thom
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 1:26 PMI thought it might be because movies might use the obvious commands frequently. Imagine if the movie paused every time a character yelled stop.
chris
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 2:36 PMyes but the chances of someone saying ‘xbox stop’ are pretty slim… the only reason this pisses me off, apart from the obvious convenience is that the kinect promotion before it was released showed them controlling a movie with voice controls.. oh well i have used it a bit with my american account for ages and it works pretty good IMO.
Gabriel McKinnon
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 3:36 AMI would have it just hold/temporarily remove the capability when paused. Say you pause so you can go off and do something quickly and just give the player that single “Xbox Play” or “Xbox Next” etc only during a paused or muted state.
Aviel08
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 10:11 AMNot at all!
All good so far!
Roland
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 10:24 AMI played with it for about 15-20 mintues and it mostly worked sweet. Just when you wen tinto some areas you had to grab the controller again. Where I can’t remember as it was late and I just wanted a quick play before going to bed :-P
Will play around some more tonight :)
moloko
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 10:26 AMIt’s a gimmick
Sven
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 10:33 AMIt doesn’t work when using Bing to search…anyone else have this issue?
James
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 12:11 PMYeah I had that issue, I could get it to go the the search screen but not actually search for anything.
DJ
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 1:25 PMSurprise surprise surprise….Bing voice search is not support in Australia
Namarrgon
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 1:49 PMBah. It wasn’t working in the preview, but I’d hoped they’d fix that for the full release :-/
Ekbul
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 10:38 AMIt worked really well for me with only a few instances of having to repeat a command. My girlfriend was watching me play around with it and wanted to try it out and it completely ignored her, wouldn’t even initiate when she said xbox. I thought it was hilarious and told her its my xbox so it only listens to me.
GirlGerms
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 10:41 AMHad some issues. It appears that it doesn’t like the way we Aussies say ‘TV’, so getting it to the TV screen either involved putting on a horribly fake American accent or saying ‘Next’ twice to get to the screen.
DAWOOKIE
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 10:46 AMI too thought it was a gimmick until l I couldn’t find my controller!
But I am not sure if MS has actually flipped the switch on our proper support in that you can not say “xbox bing batman”. It will quite happily take you to bing but does not take the batman input.
cayal
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 11:12 AMIt’s Australia, we are always shafted by Mictenony with gaming.
DarkAura
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 11:25 AMWorked OK but there was a lot of background noise where i was.
Tried the Green Lantern trailer but couldn’t get the Xbox voice commands to work when it was on. Perhaps the noise from the video playing drowned me out but it was annoying because i had to use the controller to stop it.
cayal
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 12:03 PMSo what’s quicker? Voice command or controller…baring in mind your own success rate of voice commands.
Glenn
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 9:18 AMvoice is quicker, you can skip straight to the section you want, also remembering you dont need to pick up the controller at all.
Jack
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 12:13 PMI hear that it works better if you re-run your Kinect audio setup – apparently there have been some changes to that…a friend of mine was in the beta…
Sega
Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 12:41 PMIf you log in with an American Xbox account bing works everywhere
Glenn
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 9:02 AMi have been using the voice commands since the beginning (using a US account) it was working fine even with my aussie accent. we have been using netflix with it and every now and then it would pause or skip during a show, without them saying anything like xbox, which was strange.
bing works really really well.
Captain Ouchie
Friday, December 9, 2011 at 3:24 PMYou mean it **still** doesn’t support using voice to navigate through music and movie files on the network? Phh, this is was one of the main reasons why I returned my Kinect last year! What a joke! :(
DOC
Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM..snf Ehy I wont buy one yet !