Living in the Future

Yep, we are living in the future. Because of the bizarreness of cable permissions, we’ve had to watch the Gator games on ESPN’s archive after the game is over. We’ve been doing that via the Xbox. Now, we did that last year but this year we have the Kinect.

While I haven’t been super thrilled with the Kinect as a gaming tool, the Star Wars game was a huge disappointment, it great as a tool. Especially the voice commands.

So there I am, the game running, burgers cooking. I get up to go flip them and I forgot to bring the remote. But wait, voice command! “Xbox pause” I say. The game stops!

Future, I am in you.

How cool is that? I’ve wanted good voice control for things since watching TNG as a kid. Nothing has really delivered so far. While the Xbox system for it isn’t perfect, it does some things very well. Pausing, playing, opening some menu’s. It reads those command almost perfectly so can be used as an alternative remote for watching tv.

The ultimate win will be when a voice control system is set up in the house and connected to my Google Music archive. When I can just shout out to the room for the computer to play some music, and it does, then we’ll be there.