Since just before the Isacson's biography of Steve Jobs was released there have been rumblings of Apple solving the living room problem. Jobs was quoted as saying, "I finally cracked it." in reference to AppleTV. Once those words hit the net every pundint from Alaska to Taiwan started speculating on what they were doing that is going to shake up the television industry.
Today Neven Mrgan wrote a really good article about the input methods a new AppleTV will require to really make a splash in the industry. In the post Mrgan has a few possible problems with Siri as an input method
There are practical issues with voice-controlled TV: what if it’s noisy? From, you know, the TV itself? What do I do if the Siri network is down? How do I activate this input mode - do I start sentences with “Siri…”? These issues could be addressed, perhaps.
The first question is easy to answer, and most of you have probably used it on your last cross-country flight. Noise cancelation. If the AppleTV knows the audio it is outputting to the TV then it should be able to cancel it out when it comes back in the microphone. Of course you still have to deal with any other noise in the room, but you are probably going to minimize that to enjoy your media anyway.
Network issues would be a whole other can of worms. The first option would be to include the original voice activation as a back up. Siri will work when the network is running normally and when the network goes down all the voice activation can do is strict voice commands (play, pause, etc.). This obviously is not an optimal decision but should resolve most issues.
Activation of voice features is one issue that I'm sold on an answer yet. I like the idea of an activation word and then command (this works just fine with Kinect) but an activation button on a remote seems like it would be more reliable.
I'm interested to see what Apple does with the next iteration of the AppleTV, if anything. Who knows, maybe Jobs was just talking about the current AppleTV with the addition of iCloud.
