You Can Now Control All Your Smart Home Devices on Google TV

Google’s much-anticipated TV Streamer finally launched Tuesday, and the Mountain View company synced its release with a bunch of updates to Google TV. These updates are mainly in three areas: controlling smart home devices, leveraging AI to create customized screensavers, and having your content better organized.

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Controlling smart home devices

Thanks to a brand-new home panel on Google TV, you can now remotely control your smart home devices, such as lights, thermostats, and security cameras. The panel is shown in the top-right corner of the screen, which the user can navigate to get a fully-fledged view of all the smart tech in their house. They can then go into each option and tweak its settings. There’s now a ‘Pet Cam,’ which leads to a full-screen view of their furry friend’s activity in real-time.

Google also added a new doorbell notifications feature to its TV. As the name suggests, this shows you who is at the door. The best part is that it does all this without pausing the content being played. It adds that you can use your voice to control all your devices using Google Assistant voice commands in case you can’t find your remote.

Personalized screensavers

This is a popular feature these days. In fact, we have entire products based on this concept. You can think of an idea for a personalized screensaver and have Google TV bring your vision to life using generative AI. If you’re having trouble describing your idea, you can go through a list of prompts suggested by Google TV. I recently got hands-on experience with the same feature on Panasonic’s new OLED Z95A line.

The same feature also lets you display your Google Photos on the TV. Companies are trying to avoid having a big, black canvas in the middle of the room. LG took the same approach with its transparent TV launched at CES this year and tried doing the same on its easel-looking Pose TV.

Organized content

The For You section on your Google TV is getting a dedicated sports page so you can stay acquainted using just one tab. Google claims this will include “live and upcoming games, sports commentary, YouTube highlights, and personalized recommendations.”

It’s also leveraging its LLM, Gemini, to enhance your feed’s content overviews. These overviews include “full summaries, audience reviews and season-by-season breakdowns.”

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