Google Assistant Voice Control Is Soon Coming to 2020 Samsung Smart TV Lineup

Samsung’s smart TV lineup from this year is getting Google Assistant voice control support, Samsung announced on Thursday. According to the company, the feature is currently available to 2020 Samsung TV owners in the US but will soon reach users in other countries as well. The list of TV models that are getting the voice control support includes 8K and 4K QLED TV models, the 2020 Crystal UHD TV, the 2020 Frame and Serif TV models, and lastly, the 2020 Sero and Terrace TVs. Although the Samsung TV models come with Google Assistant, the voice control feature was handled by Samsung’s Bixby platform.

Samsung smart TV owners can enable the voice control feature by heading to Settings > General > Voice > Voice Assistant once the OTA update is available on the device. With Google Assistant, users will not only be able to control the smart TV but can further manage connected smart home devices. However, it is unclear how the TV would manage Bixby support following the update and more details are awaited from Samsung soon. Meanwhile, Samsung that had introduced Bixby in 2017, will reportedly discontinue some of Bixby’s AR features this month.

Earlier this week, Google announced that a Guest mode is coming to on Google Assistant soon. The guest mode on Google Assistant is for those who don’t use Assistant due to privacy concerns since Google stores all the interactions with its Assistant on your Google account by default. In guest mode, Google won’t save those interactions, the company claims. Google says that users will be able to turn on Guest Mode on Google Assistant using voice command (“Hey Google, turn on Guest Mode”).