Kinect eliminates the need for a controller and instead relies on a combination of speech and body gestures to interact with the game. How can these two input modes be combined to enhance one another? How do you deal with the challenges of multiple speakers, background noise, and distance from the microphone? How do you use visual feedback to support error recovery? Gaming is all about having fun. How can we ensure that speech enhances this experience? Attend this session for the answers to these questions.

As home entertainment systems start to offer hundreds of channels and movies on demand, subscribers can no longer practically search for content using program listings. We describe experiments using a voice-activated system that helps users find programs by genre, title, cast names, time/date, etc. Hierarchical statistical language models enable a combination of historical behavior with current popularity ratings to increase recognition accuracy. A demo of a working prototype will show the interaction between the user, the speech recognizer, and the video display.