Motorola’s Touchless Control app available in the Play Store

Touchless Control, the ability to wake up and control the phone without ever touching it, is one of the marque features of Motorola’s 2013 devices, including the Moto X and the new Verizon Droid line.

Simply say “OK, Google Now” and the phone, which, thanks to its natural language processor, is always listening, wakes up ready to execute your commands. For instance, you can ask for the weather or for directions to a certain place, and complete any other action that is currently supported by Google Now.

Touchless Control has been published in the Play Store as a standalone app, which is sadly but predictably, limited to the four devices that feature the functionality out of the box – Droid Ultra, Droid Mini, Droid Maxx, and the Moto X.

Check out Touchless Control and other features of the Moto X in our hands-on:

You may ask, what’s the point of releasing an app that is only available on the devices that already have it installed? The reason has to do with updates – by making the feature a standalone app, Motorola can easily update it whenever needed, to add features or fix bugs. If the functionality were baked in the system, Motorola would have to push an OTA to roll out new features. This also gives us hope that more features are planned for Touchless Control in the future.