Google working on voice controls for TV, files for patent
Put down that remote. Google TV is about to bring a whole new dimension to being a couch potato. Soon, not even your fingers will have the benefit of channel surfing calisthenics. A newly uncovered patent suggests Google has some big things in the future when it comes to interacting naturally with your television. According to the patent, which was filed right around the launch of the iPhone 4S and its Siri virtual assistant, the Goog is cooking up a way for a user to simply ask as questions such as “When is Seinfeld on?” and be treated to the same results Google TV already provides.
While there is no telling how deep the service might go, on its surface it sounds a lot like Android’s Voice Actions tailored to TV. The patent mentions the ability to trigger voice commands using certain phrases, allowing users to channel surf without ever touching the remote. Diving deeper we find descriptions of a cloud-based system that uses the user’s smartphone to decode voice into text, send the information to the cloud to be processed, and then complete a process on the television set.
To go into more detail see the PatentlyApple source link below.
[PatentlyApple via GTVSource]