Xbox One announcement confounded by Kinect
Users watching the Xbox One announcement this morning found their Kinect peripherals responding as to a voice command whenever the speaker said "Xbox".
Users watching the Xbox One announcement this morning found their Kinect peripherals responding as to a voice command whenever the speaker said "Xbox".
One of the awesome things about the Kinect sensor is that you can use it to control your Xbox 360 with voice commands. Unfortunately, it doesn't have individual voice recognition — which caused a few problems for users tuning into to Microsoft's Xbox One live-streamed event at 3 am AEST Tuesday morning, reports Polygon.
To activate the voice commands, the user just has to say one word: "Xbox". During this morning's announcement, as you can imagine, the word "Xbox" was said rather a lot.
For users watching the stream via their Xbox 360, this meant a few interruptions. These included pausing the stream, opening Xbox live, or killing the stream completely, particularly when demonstrating the new Kinect voice commands.
When the guy on the #XboxReveal stream said "Xbox Live" it activated my Kinect and killed the stream. Good thinking guys.
— Jason Chen (@diskopo) May 21, 2013
@ojko7 it wasn't the stream; it's that my Kinect kept responding to the guys on screen saying "Xbox" + a command.
— Ryan Duffin (@AnimationMerc) May 21, 2013
That awkward moment, when an XBOX spokesman takes control of your kinect with his voice commands, and signs you out of the live-stream.@xbox
— Dan Nunez (@ListenChump) May 21, 2013
Microsoft has not mentioned whether or not the new Kinect can differentiate voices, for all that its facial recognition technology has improved beyond expectation. We can only hope that someone has a nice long think about this sometime in the future.