The public has spoken, voice recognition is the winner
There's definitely a science to wording polls in order to bias an outcome. But an open-ended question can generate stranger results than a carefully crafted one. Case in point: Westinghouse's HDTV Insights Poll, which asked 1,200 consumers "If you could design a TV yourself, what would you add?" And the top answer was (drum roll, please)... voice recognition. Huh? We've got to wonder where the 1,200 respondents came from. Seriously, of the top responses listed, only "120Hz refresh rate" has anything to do with picture quality. All the other features, including voice recognition, are all about convenience. It's a real slap in the face for us HD die hards -- while we obsess over image quality and tech specs, everybody else is wishing for a smarter version of "The Clapper." We'll be taking up "voice recognition" as our battle cry for spreading the word on image quality.
Filed under: Polls, Displays, Westinghouse
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
JeffDM @ Sep 27th 2007 1:25AM
Or really, "If it worked, then I'd want it be done that way". But really, it doesn't work, does it?
Voice recognition is one of the hardest to satisfy consumer electronics demands. It's not very good on a computer. While the basic commands might be simpler for a TV, the monkey wrench in the works is being able to ignore or filter out the system audio and pick out commands from the user from that potentially noisy environment.
I do understand the desire, I think it's more understandable than 120Hz, that's kind of out there, I thought it was only useful for LCDs.
Mike @ Sep 27th 2007 2:20AM
Perhaps we should see more into this- if only 1 feature was actually related to picture quality, and the #1 feature was voice recognition, then perhaps customers are crying out for simpler devices. HDTVs are probably not the easiest devices to set up and use; perhaps there's more to that Best Buy survey than we thought.
elysechia @ Sep 27th 2007 3:59AM
This is really a awesome HD Player, small, and got compnent output.
and it's only 100 USD, really nice and cheap.
There's a reference of this player, check out to know more.
http://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=168&t=404128&last=3694900
DeadPlasmaCell @ Sep 27th 2007 4:40AM
What fools we've been.. bickering back and forth over Blu-Ray and HD-DVD and format wars.. when this whole time neither were worth a damn... Voice Recognition TV is clearly the winner of the war.
timmy @ Sep 27th 2007 9:00AM
The fact is that most people care more about convenience than they do about things like picture quality. Believe it or not, a consumer poll found that the single thing people liked most about DVD was that you didn't have to rewind it - who cares that it looked 100 times better than VHS.
Guthrie @ Sep 27th 2007 10:32AM
Is anyone else reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car?
Marshall
------------
The Real HT Info Podcast
Kevin Murphy @ Sep 27th 2007 10:50AM
As in "Whatever happened to Keep It Simple, Stupid"?
Eric @ Sep 27th 2007 11:40AM
It's simply because they are fat and lazy and don't want to even have to push those dang remote keys!
Well, if remotes were designed better (TiVO being the lone exception) then maybe the results wouuld have been different. It's the thing I HATE about my Sony Blu-ray player remote. Completely illogical layout, badly arranged and poorly labled buttons. It's a joke. It makes Sony's designers look like a bunch of Dungeon & Dragons-playing, never had a date, bad-smelling, pineapple pizza-eating dorks.
Dustin Solis @ Sep 27th 2007 1:40PM
"Fresh Gear Lamp: ON!"
mike @ Sep 28th 2007 6:19AM
Voice recognition is dumb, for any application. I used the one on vista for a while to try, and it was just dumb. I felt "Why arnt I just clicking this icon on my desktop instead of trying to convinve my OS im saying "internet" so it can pop open my browser.
+ after a while I felt stupid like I was talking to myself or something. Even in those movies were they have advanced voice recognition that always works, I always get this weird feeling watching some1 talk to no1/nothing.
I think the real innovation would be thought reading activation. But thats probably sometime off still. And consumers are idiots. I would rather have 120hz on my tv then some stupid convience feature. Hell I paid and extra $500 just to get my current tv with 120hz.