Xbox One Aaron Paul Ad Is Messing With Consoles

This week Microsoft debuted an Xbox One advertisement featuring Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul. The ad has an unintended side effect: it's turning on Xbox One owners' consoles.

In the commercial, Paul is playing some Titanfall in his downtime. He uses Kinect voice commands like "Xbox On" and "Xbox Record That" to control the console.

These commands are being picked up by the Kinects of Xbox One owners watching the ad on television. It happened to me about a half hour ago, actually. The ad aired and Jesse Pinkman turned on my Xbox One through the magic of unintentional voice commands. These gamers experienced the same:

My main emotion about the situation is surprise. It usually takes me three or four attempts, with different accents, to make "Xbox On" work. I could've saved myself the effort by just imitating Aaron Paul.

Kinect's voice commands have turned out to be a great source of comedy. Earlier this year, players used the feature to troll others in Call of Duty: Ghosts. They changed their handles to "Xbox Sign Out" and then aggravated teammates in multiplayer matches. When these players said their user name out loud, they'd get logged out of the game.

The motion and voice recognition of Kinect were once deemed by Microsoft to be an essential feature of the console. However, they recently decided to make Kinect an optional peripheral. On Monday they began selling an Xbox One SKU without the Kinect. Removing the peripheral allows Microsoft to offer the Xbox One for $399, bringing the console's price in line with the rival PS4.

Buying an Xbox One without Kinect means that you'll have to miss out on the device's unintentional comedy. You'll have to rely on YouTube's closed captioning for amusement instead. Here's the first caption from advertisement's behind-the-scenes video: