Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

[Pared]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

I meant through voice.

[studbucket]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

I meant through voice.

Sorry, nothing yet.

[Boilerbuzz]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Sorry, nothing yet.

Can you say we are in store for significant improvements? I don't need details or time frame. I just need to know some of the recent frustrations will be abated at some point. There have been so many, I've gone back to the remote.

[studbucket]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Can you say we are in store for significant improvements? I don't need details or time frame. I just need to know some of the recent frustrations will be abated at some point. There have been so many, I've gone back to the remote.

Yep. The whole TV team (~40 people) still exists and will still be working to address existing bugs and add new features.

[Boilerbuzz]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Yep. The whole TV team (~40 people) still exists and will still be working to address existing bugs and add new features.

Thank you, sir. I'll be waiting patiently... Sorta.

Wow - 40! people? What do they all do? Would it be too much information to for break down how the work and tasks are divided amongst a team that size just for the TV integration? If not, I totally understand, but it couldn't hurt to ask.

Also wondering about controlling the TV and soundbar as well...

Again - any answers you can't give, I completely understand. And sorry if these questions have been asked before.

[studbucket]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Thank you, sir. I'll be waiting patiently... Sorta.

Wow - 40! people? What do they all do? Would it be too much information to for break down how the work and tasks are divided amongst a team that size just for the TV integration? If not, I totally understand, but it couldn't hurt to ask.

Also wondering about controlling the TV and soundbar as well...

Again - any answers you can't give, I completely understand. And sorry if these questions have been asked before.

Sure, here's a (hopefully) brief overview. 40 people is actually kinda small for the scope of work we picked up, especially given there are thousands of Xbox employees across software, services, hardware, supply chain, and support functions (marketing, admins, finance, etc).

Also, I made up 40. It could be +/- 5 of that, but we'll roll with 40.

The engineering team is divided up into 3 disciplines: developer (SDE), tester (SDET), and Program Manager (PM). The majority of our team is developers, probably about 75%. The testers at Microsoft aren't manual testers, they are more about writing code for automated testing, setting up frameworks, etc. We have an army of manual testers we can rely on, just like games do. These folks are contracted to work for us.

Anyway, here's all the stuff we work on:

• OneGuide UX
• OneGuide data
• App channels integration
• HDMI "passthrough" (this is really hairy and has a bunch of "sub features")
• IR blasting (another hairy area dealing with crazy amounts of device compat)
• SmartGlass apps and integration with console

That's a bit simplified, but shows what we own. Within each of those comes a lot of integration with 3rd party companies, Xbox Live services, and the console/accessories HW team.


I hope that's helpful.

[Boilerbuzz]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

That's was far more than I could have expected. Thank you VERY much. You have a point about the team size compared to what you own. Sounds like a fun and challenging group! All the best to guys and gals!

[mgoblue]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Yeah, thanks for the info! I bet HDMI passthrough isn't as simple as you'd think!

Glad there's a solid team there working on issues and improvements though. I can only imagine how much you'll be able to do in 6 months now that you're past launch and can move on to the new things.

It's also tough with power users vs. normal users. People here would love functions similar to the Harmony remote software (for instance), but the general user may not take advantage of those functions.

Another thing could be manual voice commands, where you tell it (or choose from a list) a word and associate that with some function.

All pie in the sky ideas, lots of different things you and your team could go with this. Looking forward to what we get!

Oh, which of the 3 groups of the team are you on? Just wondering...

[studbucket]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Yeah, thanks for the info! I bet HDMI passthrough isn't as simple as you'd think!

Glad there's a solid team there working on issues and improvements though. I can only imagine how much you'll be able to do in 6 months now that you're past launch and can move on to the new things.

It's also tough with power users vs. normal users. People here would love functions similar to the Harmony remote software (for instance), but the general user may not take advantage of those functions.

Another thing could be manual voice commands, where you tell it (or choose from a list) a word and associate that with some function.

All pie in the sky ideas, lots of different things you and your team could go with this. Looking forward to what we get!

Oh, which of the 3 groups of the team are you on? Just wondering...

Those are all great ideas, some of which we've definitely brainstormed. Manual speech recognition is tough, because it "infinitely" increases the size of the grammar, making it much tougher to be accurate. That's part of the reason you can't name your Xbox and call it "Jeeves" or why the voice command is "Xbox turn off", not "Xbox Off" (which got misheard as Xbox Pause and Xbox Help) a lot.

We have a lot of pie in the sky ideas, and it's all about the tradeoffs of doing those vs things some may view as "foundational". Sometimes it's OK to neglect basic things if you do something great, but you have to make the right tradeoffs.

I am a Program Manager. I have a BS and MCS in Computer Science, but haven't done any real programming for 5 years. My job is essentially to use my organizational and people skills in a technical environment. We do whatever we need to do to make sure the developers can do what they do best: code.

[onetonmartin]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Hi Studbucket, is there a way to fly through the channel guide? It's tough to go from the 200's to the 700's

[studbucket]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Hi Studbucket, is there a way to fly through the guide? It's tough to go from the 200's to the 700's

There are currently a few ways to do this:
1) Use the triggers to page up/down really fast by holding them.
2) Say "Xbox What's On [channel name]" to jump right there
3) Use the "Jump Up" and "Jump Down" commands (our House of Pain commands) to jump 100 channels
4) Add a channel to favorites to get easy access to it. I mostly do everything through favorites now. Great having app channels right next to ESPN, PBS, etc.

[mgoblue]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Those are all great ideas, some of which we've definitely brainstormed. Manual speech recognition is tough, because it "infinitely" increases the size of the grammar, making it much tougher to be accurate. That's part of the reason you can't name your Xbox and call it "Jeeves" or why the voice command is "Xbox turn off", not "Xbox Off" (which got misheard as Xbox Pause and Xbox Help) a lot.

We have a lot of pie in the sky ideas, and it's all about the tradeoffs of doing those vs things some may view as "foundational". Sometimes it's OK to neglect basic things if you do something great, but you have to make the right tradeoffs.

I am a Program Manager. I have a BS and MCS in Computer Science, but haven't done any real programming for 5 years. My job is essentially to use my organizational and people skills in a technical environment. We do whatever we need to do to make sure the developers can do what they do best: code.

Yeah, i completely understand (being a web developer myself)...

Thanks for the info, love getting insight into what you guys (and gals) do. Plus people on forums don't usually understand what can go into something like this.

[Boilerbuzz]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

There are currently a few ways to do this:
1) Use the triggers to page up/down really fast by holding them.
2) Say "Xbox What's On [channel name]" to jump right there
3) Use the "Jump Up" and "Jump Down" commands (our House of Pain commands) to jump 100 channels
4) Add a channel to favorites to get easy access to it. I mostly do everything through favorites now. Great having app channels right next to ESPN, PBS, etc.

Can I just provide some feedback on some of these. Just frank feedback and not criticisms.

1) Once you have to use the controller, the point of voice navving seems to go out of the window. It nice to be able to be control the TV while doing something else.
2) The name limitations and ambiguity are the biggest issue. Otherwise, there would be less of a need to scrub through all of the channels.
3) Jump helps, but I seem to have to use it A LOT. It doesn't seem to jump 100 channels from what I can tell.
4) I have not tried this and it would seem to be the way to work around my issues for the time being. How to add favorites, however, didn't seem to stand out to me.

[studbucket]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Can I just provide some feedback on some of these. Just frank feedback and not criticisms.

1) Once you have to use the controller, the point of voice navving seems to go out of the window. It nice to be able to be control the TV while doing something else.
2) The name limitations and ambiguity are the biggest issue. Otherwise, there would be less of a need to scrub through all of the channels.
3) Jump helps, but I seem to have to use it A LOT. It doesn't seem to jump 100 channels from what I can tell.
4) I have not tried this and it would seem to be the way to work around my issues for the time being. How to add favorites, however, didn't seem to stand out to me.

All completely fair and reasonable pieces of feedback. We realize we may have started to move away from channel numbers a bit too quickly.

You can add something to favorites by hitting "A" on the channel in the guide, or saying "Add to favorites" while in active listening mode in OneGuide.

Regarding the channels you can tune to by voice, here's the approximate algorithm (I forget the exact numbers).

Top 50 channels are pre-loaded into grammar. Your 20 most recent channels are in the grammar, and all your favorites (up to 200) are in the grammar. So, after you use it for a week, the idea is that it effectively feels like we have all the channels voice enabled.

[Boilerbuzz]

Re: Questions About Live TV on Xbox One?

Top 50 channels are pre-loaded into grammar. Your 20 most recent channels are in the grammar, and all your favorites (up to 200) are in the grammar. So, after you use it for a week, the idea is that it effectively feels like we have all the channels voice enabled.

My problem is that it can't tell "NFL Network" from "NFL Sunday Ticket".