Gemini can control settings on tCL Televisions
Ben Schoon reported for 9to5 Google this week Gemini is gaining the ability to control Google TV settings via voice—but only on certain TCL TVs currently. Announced earlier this year, a software update is rolling out now to users to enable the functionality.
“Diving into your TV’s settings menu to make adjustments can be a bit exhausting, but that’s something Gemini can now do for you,” Schoon wrote on Thursday. “With an update rolling out now, Gemini is able to adjust TV settings such as brightness, volume, sound, and picture modes. It can even tune settings to specific use cases.”
According to Schoon, this Gemini feature is exclusive to TCL for 60 days and requires Android 14 or later. It’s also exclusive to the United States and supports “select” 2025 and 2026 TCL TVs, including the QM9K, QM7L, RM7L, X11L, QM9L, QM8L, and RM9L.
From an accessibility perspective, this news is big. To be able to have hands-free access to things like adjust audio and picture mode settings can be huge for someone who, for instance, may not be able to use the TV’s remote control very easily, if at all. Likewise, it could be cognitively and visually taxing to manually navigate through the Google TV user interface despite how ostensibly simple and straightforward it’s designed; having a robot do it for you is not mere cool, futuristic luxury but downright life-changing for a certain swath of people (yours truly included). Not a trivial point.
Amazon has given Alexa similar powers with their Fire TV Cube, so this is Google jumping on the bandwagon. Apart from supporting larger text sizes, tvOS 27 seems (predictably) light on features; if the next-generation Apple TV 4K indeed is on the way and brings with it support for Apple Intelligence, it’s a golden opportunity for Apple to let Siri AI control tvOS hands-free too. Beyond a wholesale user interface revamp to make tvOS more like Google TV—or the TV app, if you prefer—having Siri AI soon be able to control various settings would absolutely add to the laundry list of de-facto accessibility features spanning Apple’s panoply of platforms. Also not a trivial point.
