System Interface

Microsoft has designed the Xbox One to be completely controllable by speaking commands to the included Kinect. For those who want to navigate by controller, though, the Xbox One's Windows 8-inspired UI is a simple and clean way to find apps and system functions for the most part.

Before you even see the first menu, the Xbox One can attempt to log you in to your Xbox Live account automatically by detecting your skeleton and facial features and then matching them with existing data. This auto-login feature sounds great in theory, but I've found it pretty inconsistent in practice. Sometimes it recognizes me almost instantly, greeting me even before the menu comes up. Other times, I have to dance around in front of the Kinect for up to 30 seconds or so to get it to figure out who I am. I have also just given up and logged in manually with a controller from time to time. I ran into the worst results when sitting on a chaise with a laptop in front of me, as I often do when reviewing games, but even sitting and standing completely unobstructed from the Kinect brought its fair share of ID problems.

Start-up speed comparison between the Xbox One (in Instant-On and cold start mode) and the PS4 (from standby; no significant difference from cold start).

Another nearly invisible system feature, Instant-On mode, is much better implemented. Besides getting the system from "off" to "on" much more quickly, setting the system to Instant-On mode lets you resume your last-played game immediately without any loading, as if you had paused the system and left it running. I was able to get back into a game of Dead Rising 3 in a total of 16 seconds from hitting the power button to being in full control. The only drawback is a power draw of nearly 20 Watts when the system is "off," but I can see the ability to jump back into a game so quickly being quite liberating.

From the home screen, you can get necessary information about how many friends and messages you have online at a glance, but you have to click through to see more details. (That's a bit annoying, but it's not a deal-breaker.) Shortcuts to the last five apps you've used are listed directly on the main menu screen, as is whatever disc is in the drive, which should be enough to get you right to where you're going a majority of the time. If you want a full list of your installed games and apps, you have to click and scroll through a long, two-row horizontal list that includes every game or app you've ever used, listed in order of how recently you've used it. Some sort of grid with a few sorting options would have been welcome here.

For apps that get used frequently (but not constantly enough to end up in that main menu list), users will probably want to "pin" the app to a nice grid that sits just to the left of the home screen. Microsoft has made a big deal of how you can get highly specific with these pins, and while locking in a shortcut to "Florence & the Machine" radio is nice, having direct access to a particular episode or season of a television show seems less likely to be useful.

Downloading a game by showing the Kinect a QR code.

Scroll to the right (past some "featured content" that seems like thinly veiled marketing), and you get right into the store, divided into Games, Music, TV & Movies, and Apps with lots of sub-listings for the most popular, most recently added, and even some decent suggestions based on other apps and games you've used. If you'd rather shop at retail stores but still want the benefits of a downloadable game, Microsoft now distributes cards with Kinect-readable QR codes that automatically find and install the game on your system (as shown in the above video).

Voice Commands

A quick stress test shows just how much you can do with Xbox One voice commands... when the system hears you, that is.

Of course, scrolling through menus is supposed to be somewhat of a fallback option on the Xbox One because you can launch everything on the system by just by saying "Xbox, go to" and having the microphone array in the included Kinect figure out what you want.

After about a week of using these voice commands every chance I could, I found them to be adequate but far from perfect. As evidenced by the above video, the voice commands were accurate about 80 to 90 percent of the time, depending on the command, the clarity of the voice, and the location of the speaker. The one significant exception to this rate was the "Xbox on" voice function, which only registered about 25 to 50 percent of the time when the system was in Instant-On mode. The system didn't do much worse than normal at picking up commands through crosstalk, occasional stutters, and mumbling, but it occasionally refused to acknowledge slow, deliberate commands.

The 10 to 20 percent of commands that the system either ignored or misinterpreted was right on the line between "annoying but usable" and "frustratingly broken" to me. Having to repeat yourself once every eight or nine times is annoying, sure, but scrolling through a cluttered menu just to find the settings screen is arguably more annoying than saying "Xbox go to settings" even if you have to do it twice.

Within apps, voice controls are more of a mixed bag. In Internet Explorer, I was kind of goofing around when I first said, "Browse to Ars Technica," and I was kind of shocked when the command actually worked and loaded the page (the system got Google, CBS, The Onion, and Vimeo without trouble, though it choked on The AV Club). Saying "Xbox, next song" to skip an atrocious radio track is also pretty handy when using Xbox Music.

Most apps, however, don't seem nearly as well tuned to generalized voice commands, usually only letting you launch options that are currently on screen. After I launched the ESPN app, for instance, I couldn't just say "Xbox, watch Maryland football" to bring up a recent game I know they have archived. Instead, I had to say "Xbox, select, guide, men's college football, page right, page right, page right, tile five, watch replay." Is it more annoying to verbally scroll through a ridiculous menu of options just to find the one I want? In practice, I usually ended up launching an app with my voice, then picking up a controller and scrolling through the on-screen menus rather than wearing out my voice with this kind of ridiculousness.

It would be nice if the system overall was a bit more forgiving or smarter about how it interprets voice commands as well. For example, I tried launching a game by saying "Xbox, go to Kinect Sports" and received no response. I tried "Xbox, go to Kinect Sports Rivals" and still got nothing. It was only when I got out the mouthful "Xbox, go to Kinect Sports Rival Preseason" that it deigned to launch my game.

The need for such precision can be a little overwhelming if you're relying on voice commands. "Snap Netflix" won't work even if the system is still listening after a previous command; you need to add the "Xbox" again or the system will just ignore you. Don't add that "Xbox" if you're using app-level commands, though, or the system is liable to ignore you. You'd better remember that it's "Add favorite" and not "Xbox, add favorite" when browsing Internet Explorer. And don't forget, it's "Xbox on," but "Xbox, turn off." Mix those up, and it just won't work.

Worse, if you give an improperly formatted command, the system seems to just pretend it doesn't hear you. There's no indication on screen telling you if what you said was actually an invalid command or if the system simply misheard what would have been a correct command if it had been working correctly. It took me way too many attempts of saying "Xbox, Snap Skype" before I finally realized that Skype actually can't be snapped to the side of the screen, and thus the Kinect was just ignoring my commands as meaningless.

Multitasking

Aside from the deeply integrated voice commands, the most transformative change the Xbox One brings to home consoles is the idea of doing more than one thing at a time. The way it does this is through a Window 8-style snap function that can put compatible apps in a thin column taking up the rightmost 20 percent of the screen while letterboxing the main app that takes up the rest of the screen.

It's pretty clear from my testing that watching video is going to be the killer application of this feature. Putting some mindless Netflix rerun that doesn't require much attention on the side of the screen while playing a game like Forza makes the loading screens go by much faster, and it fills up the silence much better than the whine of the car engines. Sure, you could do something similar with picture-in-picture on many of today's smart TVs, but the sheer simplicity of being able to say "Xbox, snap Netflix" to get things going means you'll be tempted to use it a lot more.

The only issue, and it's a big one, is that these video apps tend to get a little jumpy or desynchronized from the audio if the Xbox One is especially busy running a game. This is most noticeable during loading screens or gameplay situations where a lot of stuff is going on at once. Usually, the video app would re-sync itself after a few seconds, but in some situations, like watching Hulu Plus, the video remained jumpy and behind the audio seemingly for good. I actually got better performance running Netflix through my Wii U and passing that through the Xbox One's HDMI input as a snapped "TV" input.

It would also be nice to have some more robust, system-level sound-mixing options for this kind of snap functionality. Currently, the system defaults to mixing the audio of the snapped app and the main app together through your speakers; if you want to turn down a game to hear a video better, you have to go through that game's menu (if it's even an option). I would have liked some more sizing options for snapped apps, like a true split-screen (either horizontal or vertical) or some sort of caddy corner view where the two windows even overlap slightly.

The only really useful non-video use I've found for the snap column so far is the Xbox Live activity feed. This feed shows an auto-updating list of everything your friends are doing as you do something else on the main screen, which ends up being both useful and voyeuristic. Outside of those functions, though, I've so far found all other snappable apps to be next to useless (the NFL app wasn't available for the much-vaunted Sunday companion-watching experience, unfortunately).

Take the "Game DVR" app, which you can snap to the side to show large buttons that let you start or stop recordings. To use these buttons, you have to actively switch to the DVR app by saying "Xbox Switch" or double-tapping the Xbox button, which pauses the game running in the main window. Once you've started the recording, the snapped DVR app just sits there, taking up a large portion of your screen with a timer until you're ready to switch back and stop the recording. Why this couldn't be handled in a pop-up menu is beyond me.

The Xbox Music app similarly takes up a large portion of your screen for nothing but some hard-to-reach controls and artist pictures. It won't even run in the background if you decide to unsnap it. Snapping a persistent list of who's in your chat party to the side of the screen isn't very useful in practice, and neither is viewing a slideshow of images from SkyDrive in a tiny strip of space. Internet Explorer only sometimes resizes websites to a usable column view when snapped, and when it does, you still need to actively scroll through to read anything, so you might as well do it in full-screen mode (one exception for that last use case: if you're watching a video on the main portion of the screen, browsing even a tiny strip of a website might be useful).

More than snapping apps, I often found it more useful just to go home and switch to an app I needed in full-screen mode before returning to what I was doing. This process is incredibly quick and smooth on the Xbox One. Be warned, though: if you switch from one game to another, the system will lose any unsaved progress in the first title without warning you that it's about to happen.