New focus on Xbox as Entertainment Hub

Launching tomorrow, as anticipated, Microsoft will finally roll-out its long awaited update to the Xbox 360 dashboard. In a press release over the weekend, the firm revealed full details of the update in anticipation of tomorrow's release.

As previously reported, the new dashboard will now feature Kinect voice control, however Microsoft appears to have gone one step further and integrated Bing search into the list of features where voice can be utilised. As much as we question the usefulness of Bing as a search engine, certainly one of the more painful elements of console use is the to and fro typing on a virtual keyboard with a controller; if Microsoft can pull-off decent word recognition then this update is a very welcome one indeed.

As if that wasn't enough, the voice controlled search will extend to all content on Xbox live, Zune and selected partners for voice searches of all TV show, movie, music content and more. Such functionality is somewhat in vain if there's little content to search through, and so Microsoft has announced a very big list of new content services for its console:

It appears as though Microsoft may have beaten Apple to the punch when it comes to integrating a voice control system into a TV service, with the line-up looking fairly strong, especially for the US. This could also hurt Sony, who focuses strongly on the media capabilities of its Playstation 3 console.

Roll on December 6th!