PLYMOUTH – Comcast
on Thursday offered the Southeast Michigan technology press a demo of its new remote
control that allows customers to navigate tens of thousands of shows and movies
on the X1 platform with their voice.
The new
Xfinity remote with voice control lets viewers search for networks, shows and
movie, set DVR recordings, get recommendations, navigate Xfinity On Demand and
more.
The Xfinity
Remote with voice control recognizes thousands of common commands including
things like:
Changing the
channel if searching
for movies or shows.
The remote
even recognizes hundreds of popular movie quotes. As an example, saying “Life
is like a box of chocolates” will find the movie Forrest Gump. But, during the
demo, some of the movie catch lines thrown out were not recognized by the new
remote control, because the movies were not available on demand or in the
programming guide at Comcast, a Comcast manager said.
The voice
remote is available to all eligible X1 customers. New customers will get the
remote during their installation and existing customers can either go to an
Xfinity Store to pick one up for free or order online at
xfinity.com/voiceremote (shipping & handling charges may apply).
In addition
to voice search, the new remote is backlit for nighttime viewing and uses radio
frequency (RF4CE) transmission that lets users point anywhere when channel
surfing and store their X1 set-top box in a cabinet or another room. It also is
more ergonomic with contours that comfortably fit in the viewer’s hand. The
setup is simple, and X1 customers can program it to control their TV and AV
receiver or sound bar in just a few easy steps.
From a
technology perspective, the remote records sound from a microphone when the Mic
button is held down and then uses voice-over-RF4CE ZigBee technology to
compress and transmit that recording over a low bandwidth link to the X1
platform using natural language processing coupled with advanced
entertainment metadata and relevancy algorithms.
Comcast also
demonstrated the X1 Entertainment Operating System that can now live stream favorite
life moments over the Internet from smartphones to the television to share with
friends and family who also have X1. Through the company’s new Xfinity Share
app, customers can live stream or send photos and recorded videos to their TV,
or to the TV of another X1 customer, as well as live stream and share content
to mobile phones.
To use
Xfinity Share, currently both the sender and receiver must be Xfinity Triple
Play customers with X1 DVR capable set-top boxes.
To stream to
the TV, users just need to follow these simple steps: open the Xfinity Share
app, select Stream Live and accept the notification that appears on the TV.
The Xfinity
Share app is available to download for free from the Apple Store for iOS
devices or from Google Play for Android devices. The app leverages WebRTC, an
open Internet standard that supports real-time communication over Web browsers.
Comcast is one of the first companies to optimize this technology for the TV.
Later this
year, additional features will be added to Share including the ability to:
Share
content with virtually anyone by sending a URL via email
Send content
to up to five people at the same time
Stop, pause
and rewind the live stream
Store the
live stream in the X1 Photos app
Any photos
or recorded videos sent from Xfinity Share are stored in and accessible via the
X1 Photos app. Customers can turn off share notifications in the Photos app as
well.
