M+E Daily
Google’s New Remote Looks Back to the Future
Story Highlights
By Paul Sweeting
The search for a better way to navigate among the growing thicket of channels and apps showing up on TVs continues. Google rolled out its bid to reinvent the TV interface Wednesday with an updated version of Google TV that adds voice-driven navigation. You can watch a demo here.
Voice-driven navigation isn’t new. Microsoft’s Xbox with Kinect already offers a version of it, and Samsung’s new line of TVs offers it as well. Many analysts anticipate the next version of Apple TV will incorporate Siri, the voice-driven personal assistant on the iPhone.
Google’s take is different from those, however, both simpler and more sophisticated. Unlike Microsoft, Google isn’t trying fully to replace the traditional D-pad remote control but to enhance its capability, going so far as to put a microphone for receiving voice commands in the hand-held remote itself. Google is betting that some tasks, like scrolling left/right or up/down, are still done more efficiently using your thumb than with voice or gesture, and leaves those tasks to manual control.
At the same time, the new voice recognition system leverages a lot of Google search technology. The system draws heavily on Google Now, Google’s personal assistant app for Android that pulls in an array of contextual information to anticipate what you’re looking for. Thus, Google TV will prompt you if your favorite team is playing and provides a direct link to the channel showing the game so you don’t have to go searching for it. The goal is eventually do display content much as Google Now display information cards to users.
Not a bad effort, but there is still plenty of room for experimentation to come up with a fool-proof, intuitive next-generation TV interface.
The new system will be available on Google TV-enabled LG sets.
