My bad. LOL.
You could facillitate volume by simply saying "volume down" and the volume goes down incrementally until you say "stop" that literally the way you use a remote. You press down until you reach the desired level and release. You could use measurement increments, "half", "quarter" and "three quarters" or percentages. You could use terms that are personalized to your vocab but thats a matter of how robust MS or any voice control remote system wants to be.
Yes, until the volume reaches a threshold where voice-control will not work because the surrounding noise or the noise coming through your speakers is so loud that it will no longer hear or understand you. You'll be desperately waving your hands, shouting "Xbox one volume down!" wishing you had a remote. Nice.
All other examples you and others have named could be solved with better interfaces. In fact, some of the stuff, is already doable. Using voice-control requires some sort of program that deals with the logic. It'll need to tag sentences to the correct content - which might be easy if you stick to the few sports channels you have, but can be very complicated to handle, once you dip into the thousands of movies, soaps and tv programs that exist. Think about how many possibilities that would need to be taken care of. Things like this only work well, if you have complete control and works flawlessly. In the context of Xbox One, things might work better as long as it's handled entirely on the Xbox alone - in other words, video apps, store apps and games running on the Xbox. As soon as you are controlling other devices through HDMI or IR blaster, expect things to take a sevear turn for the worse. As soon as you still need a remote for certain functions, like volume control, it kind of defeats the purpose of having a voice-command-only interface.
This all sounds like a lot of potential, perhaps added by a flair of science-fiction represented in many movies or novels where these kinds of things miraculously
just work, but in a practical sense for the average consumer? Nope. I really don't see it as there are far too many issues that come with it. And at this point, we haven't even considered that there are far more regions where such a control-scheme would be even harder to get right - where different dialects of the same language pose different challenges.
You named numerous examples where voice-controls work better than a normal remote would. Well, to give you a counter-example -
anything that requires to display some sort of list, works better with a directional pad on a simple remote. Like settings, configurations, tv guides etc. IMO - the cons far outweigh the pros when you think about it in "voice-control-only" vs "remote-control-only" terms.
And to the last point, we are only really talking about the possibilities here, how easy it would be. If the Xbox One actually offers this kind of advanced voice-control is still left to be seen. At this point, it could just be a glorified remote-control where every button on your remote is mapped to a simple voice-command. We don't know yet, how far the logic and possibilities expand beyond this.
Perhaps the problem is that you really need a modern AV receiver with built-in HDMI-CEC in order for the demo that Microsoft showed off to really work the way they showed off, but for the few people who do have such a compatible setup, it'll be awesome.
So, in other words, in order for Xbox One to work as flawlessly as expected, consumers will be required to have devices that have HDMI-CEC? Sounds a bit far fetched. The product is only as good as it effectively works in an average home (if it relies on features of other devices).
