Voice assistants aren’t just for smart speakers anymore. The artificial intelligence tools have slowly been sneaking out from their cases and into basically every product imaginable, and TVs are no exception. Soon, you will be able to keep your remote on the table because Google Assistant will reportedly be making its way to Samsung television sets in 2019, according to Variety.
Samsung hasn’t confirmed its future line of TVs will, in fact, include support for Google Assistant. It seems likely that if the feature is coming to its 2019 TVs, it might be announced at the upcoming CES 2019 technology show set to be held in Las Vegas next month. It’s pretty standard for the company to unveil new products and features during the event.
The report of the Google Assistant addition to Samsung TVs still leaves a lot unknown. It’s not clear if Google Assistant will be the only voice assistant on the device or if Samsung will continue to support its own Bixby assistant. It seems likely that it will function similarly to LG TVs, which added support for Google Assistant and Alexa last year. Those TVs allow users to change volume, switch channels, and change inputs with their voice. They also allow you to control other connected Google Assistant devices or ask questions like you can with a standard smart speaker like the Google Home.
If Samsung does add Google Assistant support to its TVs, it could mark the end of Bixby. Samsung’s first-party voice assistant has been installed on its TVs and other devices in the past but has started to fall behind its competitors. Bixby doesn’t currently support third-party skills (though it reportedly will soon) and was just recently made available for other companies to include in their products. A smart speaker for the assistant meant to compete with the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod was announced in August but has yet to come to fruition. It’s not clear if Samsung will continue to ship its next line of TVs with Bixby or if it is instead abandoning the assistant entirely in favor of third-party solutions like Google Assistant. We’ll likely know more in just a few weeks.
