iPhonefreak width="190"

At a Tech Showcase for AT&T earlier today, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler caught a glimpse of a new project that could potentially redefine the way we search for television programming. In short, it allows you to search for TV shows via voice command on your iPhone. Your voice gets transmitted to AT&T’s servers, and from there your command gets processed, and the result is then sent to your TV. It may sound laborious, but as you can see from the video demo below it’s nearly instant.

The unnamed project is still nowhere near ready for consumers, but it’s good to see that AT&T is trying to push the bar for user experience. For the most part, user interfaces in cable boxes have been fairly slow to change. The current Comcast guide isn’t very much different than the DirectTV guide I was using in the late nineties, save for faster menus (but not always), and more On Demand content. Searching for programming with text would be a nightmare on a remote–and since keyboards are far from a commonplace item in most living rooms, searching has remained nearly impossible to implement.

I don’t think the project will remain strictly an iPhone-only deal, but I wonder how AT&T will implement it for their non-smartphone owning customers.

[Source: TechCrunch]