Oculus Home Voice Search Now on Rift and Gear VR Makes Browsing Your VR Library a Breeze

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Recent updates to Oculus Home on both desktop and Gear VR have added a Voice Search feature which makes zipping around your VR content library much easier than the old method of digging through menus and thumbnails.

Update (2/10/27, 9:28 PT): It seems this feature hasn’t yet been rolled out to all users. We’ve reached out to Oculus to confirm when it will see wider distribution.

The industry is still figuring out the best way to make user-interfaces in VR. Oculus Home on Rift and Gear VR is a start, but there’s still usability trouble that comes with the need to support a userbase which could be controlling the interface with some combination of their head and a static input device (like a touchpad, gamepad, or Oculus Remote) or with motion controllers like Touch, none of which have a method for quick keyboard input.

With no keyboard (the way we search for pretty much everything on computers), finding specific items in your library or the store means hoping that you’re looking in the right section of some categorization system, or scrolling slowly through thumbnails to find what you want.

The new Voice Search feature (which Oculus says is in beta) now available in Oculus Home on Rift and Gear VR makes it way easier to get to exactly the app or group of apps you want, whether in the store or in your own library. See how it works in the video heading this article.

oculus-home-voice-searchOn both headsets you can click the Voice Search button to search for apps by category (ie: Racing, Action, Social), to find the library page for specific apps (ie: “find Altspace”), or to launch specific apps outright (ie: “Launch Dead and Buried“). Both can also be used to perform a ‘Recenter’ action to get the headset re-aligned in case you move.

The Rift version can be conveniently triggered with the command “Hey Oculus”, in addition to clicking the button. At this point though, it seems the voice activated command is only responsive when in Oculus Home, though hopefully we’ll see it expanded into the Oculus menu (which can be called up while apps are running), and into apps themselves (with the hope that expanded capabilities would allow you to easily send invites and do other friends list functions).

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Voice Search on both headsets was pleasingly accurate in our initial tests, and while it can understand a reasonable breadth of variable inputs for the same search (ie: “find social apps,” vs. “show social games”), it’s not positioned as a sort of ‘AI assistant’ like Siri or Alexa (though something like that would certainly be welcome in VR).

This is something we hope to see expanded in scope and to other VR platforms too, because it’s just so darn useful.

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Cool stuff! Voice is great to increment usability… the problem is that it can be used only if you’re alone in your home… otherwise yelling commands you look strange!

    • benz145

      That’s true. I used to like how Siri would make a beeping sound when she started listening, it was a good social queue to others around you to let you know that you were going to talk to your phone and not to them. But then Apple removed that, and now frequently people think I’m saying something to them when I’m just telling Siri to set a timer for me!

      The “Hey Oculus” prompt could work well as a similar signal though.

  • Robert England

    Do we All have to wait until 2027? (hehe typo above Lol)