- Xbox 360 Fall 2011 Dashboard up Features and Expectations
- Bing and Kinect Voice Control
- Cloud Storage and Expanded Media Content
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Bing and Kinect Voice Control
Even with the dramatic improvements to the dashboard, sometimes you just want to go directly to a specific bit of content. That's where Bing comes in. Bing is Microsoft's popular search engine, and it's going to be integrated directly into the Xbox 360's software.
Bing on Xbox 360 will search for content both on your system and available via the various services, so you can find the exact game, movie, TV show, sporting event, or music you want. While the standard controller will work just fine for this type of search, it's not nearly as fast as using Kinect's voice-recognition capabilities.
With Kinect, you can simply say what you're looking for and you'll get back all the relevant results. For instance, as shown in the example in Figure 2, saying, "Xbox, X-Men" will show all of the content related to the X-Men; saying, "Xbox, show movies" will filter out all the TV, game, and music content.
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Figure 2 Finding all available X-Men content using only voice
Beacons
Dictionary.com defines a beacon as "a guiding or warning signal," and that's precisely how the new Beacon feature will act on your Xbox 360. By setting a Beacon, you can tell your Xbox LIVE and Facebook friends that you want to play a particular game on Xbox LIVE. When a Beacon is set, no matter what else you're doing on Xbox LIVE, your friends will know it's OK to ask you to play your beaconed game. This represents a big improvement over the standard blind notification system because if you're watching a Netflix movie, for example, they'll know it's OK to interrupt you for some Gears of War 3 action because you said so with a Beacon.