Gadgetory

if you're curious how Motorola's proposed hands-free experience on the Moto X is useful look no further I'm Taylor Martin this is PocketNow and these are the best uses for touchless control on the Moto X Motorola introduced a host of new and unique features for its latest handsets such as the x8 computing system and Motorola skip which we've covered in a video yesterday one of the unquestionably awesome benefits of the x8 computing system however is the low-power core that's dedicated to natural language processing it's always listening for your voice and ready to answer your commands or questions at any given time essentially saying okay Google now activates a local recording that is then sent to Google service for decoding once you finish speaking and the phone unlocks the Google search application then determines what sort of action should be taken the brunt of what touchless control as Motorola calls it will be used for quick hands-free google searches but that's only the tip of the iceberg if you've spent any time cueing voice action commands with Google Search application you know the service is equipped for all sorts of different actions but paired with a totally hands-free experience there are some commands that become even more awesome for example many of us stream music from our phone well in the car changing music on your phone is like it or not a distraction and sometimes more tedious than simply hitting a number for a preset radio station on your car stereo using touchless control you can simply say okay Google now play Tears for Fears you can name an album song or artist and you can choose your preferred music applications such as google music or Spotify this specific application could be more robust such as having the ability to play one of your playlists or an entire artists discography but the ability to just speak the name of the song you want to listen to is certainly nice or say you're out somewhere and hear a song playing and you want to know the name there are a handful of applications that will listen to a small portion of the song and give you all sorts of information on it but it never fails I always seem to take too long to open the app and miss the song but touchless control you can start the search without touching your phone or fumbling through your home screens trying to find this sound hound or Shazam app simply say okay Google now what song is this there listen to a short clip of the song and speak the answer to you this hands-free ability also makes it possible to send an email through voice commands which may sound a bit silly and lazy but I assure you it comes in handy especially in our line of work save the ok Google now command emailed say the name of the contact you want subject the topic of the message and then message for a better example say ok Google now email Michael Fisher subject Hey message jerk period whether you're in the kitchen cooking a new recipe or sitting at your desk in need of some unit or currency conversions Google search can do all the heavy lifting for you speak ok Google now and state the conversion or simple math equation you need answered in this case we converted cups to liters but you can do all sorts of math equations such as cube roots simple addition and even fraction conversions to decimals on top of that you can use Google to fact-check ok Google now how old was Nikola Tesla or ok Google now when will the Sun set today and if that simply doesn't do it for you you can also launch web pages without ever touching your phone ok Google now go to pocketnow.com and one of the features motorola effectively showed off was the ability to set an alarm hands-free while laying in bed ok google now set an alarm for 9 a.m. or you can use this feature as a timer ok Google now set an alarm for 24 minutes from now the best part of setting an alarm is that it also works for third-party alarm apps such as timely but this isn't the extent of what you can do with touchless control you can ask for directions to somewhere or a map of some place you can call people or open applications set calendar appointments and reminders or even post to Google+ the actions we've mentioned here are the ones that have stuck out most to us in our short time with a Moto X and touchless control the ones that feel the most useful to us the question we want you to answer though is is touchless control a useful feature or a gimmick so far we're leaning towards the latter as it's come in handy in many different situations in less than a week it's also encouraging us to use voice commands more than we normally would but we're not certain that will last don't forget to join the discussion below by sharing your thoughts touchless control and the Moto X and be sure to give us a thumbs up they let us know you enjoyed the video and found it helpful subscribe to see more videos like this one in the future and follow us in all the usual places twitter google+ and facebook at pocket now you can find me on twitter at casper tech i'm taylor martin and i'll see you next week