[haikuginger]

Remote tangent, the fix for the Ortek MCE IR problem I mentioned earlier (up/down keys getting double pressed) was to set the device 'command repeat' in the Harmony software for the device to 1. (Not 3, not 0, 1.) NOW I have my Harmony remote fully controlling the Fire and XBMC the way I want it to. (*Thinks about making snarky "boyfriend acceptance factor" joke, refrains*)

On another tangent: In the last 10 minutes, the Voice Search button on my Fire remote has stopped working. It appears to work, registers your voice volume, says "Thinking..." and never returns any results. Does anyone know if the Voice Search has to talk to Amazon servers to work? If anyone is reading this with the Fire in front of them, can you give your Voice Search a quick test and tell me if it's working? Wondering if something is down on Amazon's end. (Have restarted the Fire...it was literally working like 10 minutes ago.)

EDIT: It's working again now, out of nowhere. So I do think there's a cloud-side component to the Voice Search, maybe?

It's almost certainly cloud-based. If you look at how Google Now and Siri work, both stream the voice data directly to the cloud and get plaintext as well as command interpretations back. The exact implementation varies, but average Internet bandwidth has reached the point where it's simply much easier to do the recognition on a dedicated server.

It's a trend that we've seen over and over again- as Internet bandwidth has increased, the better choice for many purposes, from a user interaction perspective, has been to have remote servers actually work on data instead of having the user-facing device do it.