Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

Another commenter called out a use I hadn't thought of: operating media center PCs without a mouse or remote. Since you only need brief interactions, the fatigue wouldn't a big deal.

View on HN

Personally, I'd rather tell my media centre PC to change channel with a voice command than wave my hand at it. Seems more natural to me. I'm sure flicking through channels would be easy enough with some kind of motion commands, but navigating to specific channels, how would you do that? I guess you could have a specific gesture for each individual channel, but even then, it would me much easier to just say the name of a chennel. Another idea would be a specific gesture to go to the list of channels, which you could then scroll through and select, but this is still more work then voice commands. I'm not saying this technology sucks, I think it's fantastic, but it doesn't solve every UI problem.

Ive read a commenter here in HN remark on how the Voice recognition of the Kinect is something that is seriously being slept on/not paid enough attention too.

That's because it's just 4 microphones. You STILL have to do the speech recognition yourself, and that's tough.

The new part of the Kinect is the 3D stuff, so that's what people are playing with.

That's odd, the XBox SDK had a speech recognition library build in to it. I presumed that shipped as part of the XBox 360 SDK?

Of course, in order not to change the channel, you'll have to stand very still...

I'm not sure if you are joking here or not -- but, if you've played with the Kinect on a 360, you'd note that it can recognize your hands, and only when you hold your hands out for a set period of time (2-3 seconds, cannot recall exactly) the Kinect wakes up and begins to allow you to input controls.

I was joking. I failed to locate the correct reference to the Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, but I am sure there is a joke on gesture recognition somewhere in there.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com