Gadgetory

i TV power on I'm David Katz mine from CNET and that was a look at the Smart interaction power on capability built into Samsung's high-end TVs this year these sets have voice control and gesture control says a little built-in camera and microphone along the top of this TV I'm going to be taking an in-depth look at those features today this is a Samsung pn6 de 8000 this features available in a bunch of different LCD and Plasma TVs this year at the high end of the line in addition to the camera and microphone the TVs also include a special touch remote control with its own built-in microphone so you speak right into this like you do in voice dictation and it actually allows the TV to pick up the voice commands a little bit better we'll start out with voice commands the way this thing works is you basically have to say hi TV every time you want it to do something now of course it might misinterpret what I'm doing because I'm talking now but you see along the bottom there's AB set of commands down there and I can say more commands that brings up another menu your video now this is probably the most useful feature for voice command because searching on a remote control takes a long time by voice it should be faster hi TV search Parks and Recreation so that was a failure although you know what there's the search result right there at this point you can't actually say down or enter or watch or anything like that you have to grab your remote control drive down and select it let's try another search 2 broke girls another failure it's not quite as accurate as it could be let's try the remote control 2 broke girls a little bit better but again no results now let's try another show American Idol that's success pretty good The Bachelor not bad again another success rate looking for the TV show you can also command your cable box via voice because the TV includes a built-in IR blaster that I've already synced to work with my DirecTV system let's see how it works channel number two zero zero let's try again channel number this one took me to channel 9 you can also use voice to launch apps from within samsung's Smart TV system so let's try that hi TV more commands Smart Hub so the second major component after voice to Samsung Smart interaction is gesture control and that's literally waving at the TV screen I'll show you how it works start off by just sticking your hand up and it picked up my hand here let's change channels you kind of grab it like that go up you can also use the gesture control to change your volume and if you click on the middle of the screen takes you to a couple of other areas for example the Smart Hub now this is where in theory it's a little bit nicer than using the remote control because again you can drive around over here let's check out the web browser that was a little coarse trying to bring it up here a little bit more difficult than it could be to navigate this webpage so as you can see navigating on the web does work with gesture control it's just a little bit awkward and Wow my arms are tired so after playing a little bit with the Smart interaction feature voice and gesture control I can say that it feels pretty bethe gesture works as well as it needs to but really it's not going to be the main way to control the TV same thing with voice control which often has a lot of mistakes and can be a little bit more frustrating to use than actually just picking up your remote control and most people actually have the remote control in hand another big issue is that when you're watching on DVR for example there aren't any commands built into the IR blaster to say fast forward or skip ahead 30 seconds so again you're going to need to remote anyway and once you have that remote you're going to do 99% of the actions associated with your TV a lot easier than you will via voice or gesture that's a quick look at samsung's Smart interaction on its high-end TVs both plasma and LCD for 2012 I'm David Katz my