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One of the coolest moments of the demo combined the Kinect's voice controls and this personal recognition capability, letting PR Manager Jose Viniera take over control of the system instantly without a controller. Viniera simply said, "Xbox, show my stuff," and the system quickly popped up a "Hello, Jose" message, repopulating the menu with his recent activity and pinned favorites. Viniera pointed out that the data for this personalized menu was stored in the cloud, so it could be brought up on any Xbox One. (Personal biometric data, on the other hand, is never uploaded on the cloud. Viniera would have to set up recognition on any new system he wanted to use). The Kinect didn't identify Jose by his voiceprint, but it instead recognized where in the room his command was coming from, triangulating the location using an internal array of five microphones (Henshaw said this process is "within five-inch accuracy"). The system then looked at the figure it detected in that location, recognized it was Jose, and automated the login process for him. It was an impressive, friction-free moment that I can see being used a lot in multi-user households (and abused a lot in households with annoying little brothers). |
| Overall, my short time with the Xbox One's system interface made me eager to try the system out in my own home and see if its voice commands and multitasking features could actually make Xbox One the only input I need on my TV. Before the demo, I was leaning toward "no" as an answer to that question, but now I'm leaning a little closer to "yes." |
And to please some on here:
| there was a live snafu, though, when Skype had to go through its 10-second cold-load sequence after a switch, despite having been just loaded into memory |
