The voice-activated, always-on Moto X will be available from all four wireless carriers for $200 with a two-year contract. Interested? August 2, 2013 2:54 PM PDT Meet the Moto X. (Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET) In case you've just come out from under your rock, the Moto X was unveiled in New York Thursday. Why should you care? Designed to be an anti-iPhone, the Android phone marks the revival of Motorola Mobility since the Google takeover, and comes with a range of attractive features. Priced at $200 as part of a two-year contract, it has a 4.7-inch touch screen, a 10-megapixel camera, and multiple processors. You can customize it with bamboo and other wood surfaces, add a short message, or choose 16GB or 32GB models. But voice command is the selling point. Trained to the user's voice, the Touchless Control is always on and acts as a portal to Google Now, the personal assistant that's meant to work with natural language queries. Responding to "OK Google Now," the service can proactively provide information on everything from traffic conditions to personal appointments based on the vast stores of data in Google servers. The phone is part of a grand artificial intelligence experiment. With futurist Ray Kurzweil as its chief engineer, Google is determined "to bring natural language understanding" to the search engine, as Kurzweil's job description reads. The Moto X and Google Now are feeding that effort. So will the phone help conceive a future AI that's smart enough to pass the Turing test, showing that machine intelligence can be indistinguishable from that of a human? Who knows. But does the Moto X have enough features now to make you crave one? Vote in our poll and leave your comments below. Read the CNET Editors' Take Motorola Moto X Editors' Take: With powerful new processing, an elegant design, and fresh Android software, Motorola’s Moto X is a tempting smartphone proposition. Read More
The voice-activated, always-on Moto X will be available from all four wireless carriers for $200 with a two-year contract. Interested?
Meet the Moto X.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)
In case you've just come out from under your rock, the Moto X was unveiled in New York Thursday. Why should you care?
Designed to be an anti-iPhone, the Android phone marks the revival of Motorola Mobility since the Google takeover, and comes with a range of attractive features.
Priced at $200 as part of a two-year contract, it has a 4.7-inch touch screen, a 10-megapixel camera, and multiple processors. You can customize it with bamboo and other wood surfaces, add a short message, or choose 16GB or 32GB models. But voice command is the selling point.
Trained to the user's voice, the Touchless Control is always on and acts as a portal to Google Now, the personal assistant that's meant to work with natural language queries.
Responding to "OK Google Now," the service can proactively provide information on everything from traffic conditions to personal appointments based on the vast stores of data in Google servers.
The phone is part of a grand artificial intelligence experiment. With futurist Ray Kurzweil as its chief engineer, Google is determined "to bring natural language understanding" to the search engine, as Kurzweil's job description reads. The Moto X and Google Now are feeding that effort.
So will the phone help conceive a future AI that's smart enough to pass the Turing test, showing that machine intelligence can be indistinguishable from that of a human?
Who knows. But does the Moto X have enough features now to make you crave one? Vote in our poll and leave your comments below.
Motorola Moto X
Editors' Take: With powerful new processing, an elegant design, and fresh Android software, Motorola’s Moto X is a tempting smartphone proposition. Read More
