Watch Gary Busey Demonstrate Amazon's Fire TV Voice Search Feature

This week, Amazon launched their new set-top box Fire TV, along with the above ad, which has Gary Busey expressing his love of talking to things. That leads into a demonstration of of the voice search -- "that actually works" -- feature that's included with this new device. After wandering around talking to random objects, Busey attempts to search for himself on Roku but is denied. Things go a bit better for him when he uses Amazon's Fire TV, which gives him all the Busey he can handle.

As a Celebrity Apprentice fan, this ad gave me a major flashback to that LG ad Busey's team made, which also had to do with smart devices in the home, come to think of it...

Back to Fire TV, we talked in depth about what this new device is offering, and you can read our breakdown for that here. Fire TV's offering a lot of features (including gaming capabilities), so it's interesting to see that Amazon has chosen to target the voice feature for their first Fire TV ad. Though it's likely they're hoping it'll help set the Fire TV apart from other set-top boxes. As I mentioned when I was comparing the Fire TV's features to Apple TV, it would be nice if Apple had incorporated Siri into their device to allow users to search by voice. That's much easier said than done of course, however it looks as though Amazon's taken their own set-top box a step ahead with this new feature. The question is, does the voice command feature "actually work" as well as Busey makes it look in his demonstration? And is that enough of a reason to convince people to consider choosing Fire TV over Apple TV?

We'll be interested in seeing the customer reviews for Fire TV once people start sharing their own experiences with it. In the meantime, Busey sure is convincing.

And that brings us to the poll we ran yesterday, asking people whether or not they "needed" a Fire TV. Here's a look at the results as of Thursday evening...

Only 17% said they need it, while the rest of the results indicate that people are pretty much covered in terms of how they stream their digital content to their televisions. Apple TV seems to have come out ahead in that regard, beyond Roku, Chromecast, gaming consoles, smart TV/Blu-ray players and other.

Amazon may be coming into this set-top box race a little bit late in the game, but that doesn't mean they can't surpass their competition in time, especially if the feedback for this device is positive.