Voice control is one of the many (too many?) new features on show in this year’s high-end TV brands, offering us the chance to abandon all voluntary movement as we sink into the sofa.
Dragon TV is one of the many voice-control and transcription technologies created by Nuance, found in this year’s LG and Panasonic flagship screens.
Recombu Digital had the chance to enjoy a demo of the technology in TVs, while our petrolhead siblings at Recombu Cars were given a demo in a hands-free car (OK, not entirely hands-free).
The voice control combines with the TV’s smart features such as internet search to control almost every feature without manual input.
With the TV trained to his voice, our genial host changed the channels, brought up the channel list and programme guide, set up a recording and then asked the TV to ‘search for Barack Obama on Wikipedia’.
Aside from one queried response, the TV obeyed instantly, using Nuance’s Far-Talk technology, which can sort out a commanding voice from the living room hubbub.
Reimund Schmald, marketing manager at Nuance said: “We have some technology running inside the TV for command and control, and we have some specific technology which is running in the cloud, for example, for Wikipedia search, YouTube search or a general Google search.
“The first TVs are already heading for the market, so you can see this is not a vision any longer.”
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