Last month, I lashed out against cable companies and their cable boxes because they are junk. Absolute trash. The hardware is slow, the UIs are terrible, and the remotes are like Fisher Price toys. This is 2009, not 1989.
Today in San Francisco, AT&T held a Tech Showcase to show off some of the new innovations they are working on in their labs. One such thing I got a demo of was a way to use your iPhone to search television content simply by using your voice. While you may think something like this is less than ideal, it’s fast and very accurate. Watch below as the demonstration goes from simple to more complex. And, of course, a regular touch-based remote is included as well to select things.
By the way, none of this is actually happening on the iPhone or on your actual TV. Instead, your iPhone is connected to AT&T’s service where it does the voice filtering on its end — and it’s still this fast. This project isn’t quite ready for consumer use, but as you can tell, they’re not far off either. I would replace my cable box with something that has this in a second.
Seriously? 95% of Americans would rather pickup the remote than try and remember all the TV channels.
what does that even mean in context of this video? he’s saying the name of a TV show he wants to watch. have you ever tried to search for something on your cable box with a remote? i think i’d rather watch puppies die.
I agree, but still love the MOXI box from Motorola. The UI is excellent. I think it would be great instead of having to type on the tv they put a iphone type keyboard on the romote. Or even have the whole remote touchscreen.
my bad should have read the post below me first.
i.TV for the iPhone does the touch-based remote thing with TiVo on the iPhone and will soon have other remotes as well. http://i.tv/new...ess/2009.08.17/
I need this. My cable box makes me insane.
it took me 12 minutes to find the world series on my comcast box last nite—comcast ui is like 1983!
ha ha took me a while too for the same thing!
Couldn’t agree more.
I’m being held hostage by Directv and their ruthlessly crappy UI.
It literally killlllls me.
And I pay like 100 bucks a month for it.
Tivo was decent but they fell way off the map when DTV dropped them.
The next carrier to come up with a good user experience will win more than $1000 from me every year! Let’s DO this.
Just switched from Comcast to AT&T U-Verse. U-Verse makes Comcast feel premitive. The difference is huge. Think of it as Windows 3.1 and XP type of huge.
got my first demo of u-verse today. it is MUCH nicer. also some cool stuff that’s not out yet. have to see if my videos came out of that.
I agree that cable boxes are crappy. My Time warner cable box is made by Scientific Atlanta (Cisco).
Takes about 10 minutes to boot up (hard boot). The UI is not friendly to find shows. Search for “NFL” displays matches for next 2 weeks, without prioritizing the match for tonight for the next 2 nights.
Though, an iPhone application is hardly of value to most consumers. Most of us don’t have an iPhone, don’t want to invest in an expensive remote. This just shows how the cable companies and their vendors are not listening to customers (neither is the media)
MG, talk about majority of consumers, not the minority who have iPhone.
They mentioned that the voice recognition service runs on their servers, not on the iPhone. That should make it possible to do this with just about any kind of phone. Better yet, they could just make a remote control with a microphone and a touchscreen. Just make it an inexpensive Android device and it would run apps, too.
Is this AT&T’s attempt to be like Google? i.e. We’ll give you something cool, if you tell us what you’re searching for (so we can aggregate the data.)
Put a microphone and display in the remote and have it interface with the cable box and I’m sold.
I agree – bypass the mobile. Let me speak to the screen in front of me.
Interesting .. web search on TV is not bad ..
I am a soccer fan. I use Ask TV vertical to search for TV results. Like..
“manchester united soccer game”
http://www.ask.com/?tool=tv
If search returns right shows, I would like to DVR is right away or switch channel (if its running now). Providers need to have open API so that third party can develop software for better experience.
I think this is a cool feature that is way better than the cable remote. That thing drives me crazy sometimes with all the buttons.