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

Google’s long-awaited TV Streamer finally launched on Tuesday, and the Mountain View company coincided its release with a slew of updates to Google TV. These updates are mainly in three areas: controlling smart home devices, using AI to create customized screensavers, and making your content better organized.

Controlling smart home devices

Thanks to the 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 displayed in the upper right corner of the screen, the user can navigate to get a complete view of all the smart technologies in his home. They can then go into each option and adjust its settings. Now there’s 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 notification 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.

Custom screensavers

This is a popular feature these days. In fact, we have entire products based on this concept. You can imagine a personalized screen saver idea and make Google TV bring your vision to life using creative AI. If you have trouble explaining your idea, you can go through the list of instructions suggested by Google TV. I recently got hands-on experience with a similar feature on Panasonic’s new OLED Z95A line.

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

Edited content

Your Section on your Google TV gets a dedicated sports page so you can stay up-to-date with just one tab. Google says this will include “live and upcoming games, sports commentary, YouTube highlights, and personalized recommendations.”

It also uses its LLM, Gemini, to improve the content overview of your feed. This overview includes “full recaps, audience reviews and season-by-season breakdowns.”