I Let AI Take Over Google TV And It Solves Broadcasting’s Biggest Problem

Doomscrolling is a concept we are all very familiar with. Netflix may have a seemingly endless list of movies to offer, but finding one you actually want to watch always seems out of reach. Too often I find myself sitting on the couch, out of my reach, trying to figure out what to watch in the evening in vain. The paradox of modern broadcasting is that the more options we have, the harder it is to settle on anything, turning leisurely evenings into a grueling exercise in decision paralysis. I? I’m usually on YouTube. But I’m running.

I was recently offered an interesting solution to this very discovery problem by Lumio, India’s first hardware startup. Dubbed Project Neoit’s an experimental AI agent designed to bridge the gap between the devices we use to discover content and the screen we view it on. The best part is that it does this through the apps you use every day.

By connecting an AI agent directly to you Google TV Via WhatsApp and Instagram, Project Neo promises to take the friction out of the living room entertainment equation. After a week of letting a chatbot dictate my evening viewing habits, I’m convinced that this approach to content discovery is what’s missing from the smart TV ecosystem. Also, it might be one of the smartest use cases of AI I’ve come across recently.

The biggest flaw of modern smart TV platforms is the disruption of content discovery. The second biggest drawback is that it is still largely genre dependent. There’s a lack of nuance and understanding that a masterful horror film likes Midsummer It has more in common with the English classics The Wicker Man and less so with whatever horror Netflix is ​​peddling today.

Stream interfaces designed to increase engagement time, and users are expected to watch dense networks of ad tiles, watch auto-playing trailers we don’t want, or navigate multiple menus using a remote that hasn’t changed much in the last few decades. This ignores the fact that discovery happens on our smartphones through forums like Reddit and social platforms like Instagram.

Because our discovery habits are entirely mobile, translating that discovery to the big screen is a challenge. If your friend sends you a movie recommendation, you have to memorize the title, figure out which streaming app they’re on, pick up the remote, open the app, and manually type in the name of the movie or use the common voice search. Google Assistant can help reduce some of this friction, but in my experience, it fails more often than not.

Project Neo takes on this dynamic by moving the entire discovery process back to the smartphone using an interface that everyone knows how to use. The system is based on a TV utility called TLDR. You then follow a fairly standard QR code-based pairing process that connects a WhatsApp chatbot to your account. that’s it. You can now chat directly with the bot using both text and voice input, turning it into a speech input device for your TV.

The beauty of this integration is its simplicity. Users don’t need a new app on their phone. Project Neo brings access to where you already are. No need to stream or switch between screens. Just enter the name of the content you want to watch and TLDR will display it. From there, just tap on the thumbnail and it will record the movie while you’re logged into the service. If you’re not, it will tell you which service the piece of content is available on, along with nice metadata including posters, banner images, and a short summary. You can even find cast information.

The functionality, of course, goes far beyond a smartphone-based media launcher. It has an amazing number of features built in – including a fully developed recommendation engine. And this is where AI smarts start to appear. During the test, I asked him for recommendations for movies similar to the classic epic adventure Lawrence of Arabiaand issued spot recommendations like this one Ben-How and The Last Emperor.

The actual experience of using Project Neo feels incredibly fluid in practice. Instead of hunting for a specific title, you can talk to the WhatsApp bot exactly like you would a friend, thanks to slang and abbreviated communication support. You can ask the bot to draw something as simple as trending movies or as complex as an obscure, neo-noir crime thriller from the 90s featuring a top-rated and at least one Oscar-nominated actor. Suffice it to say, he gave me solid recommendations on my projector screen. You can even watch movies longer than 90 minutes with additional requests like filtering. Pretty cool.

If you don’t want to type, you can send a voice note to the bot and it will handle the requests just fine. Moreover, requests are not limited to cinema only. You can search for movies, music videos and sports scores. For the latter, the TV shows the title cards with game highlights, but so far there is no way to let you into the ongoing match.

In addition to standard text requests, Project Neo integrates social media connections into the television experience, breaking another mass disconnect in the modern living room. Today, most of my discoveries happen through Instagram. I have a collection full of interesting world cinema to watch. But that’s the problem with Instagram; that collection lingers on the platform because I forget to check it when I’m looking for a new watch.

With Project Neo, you can link your Instagram account to the platform. When you send any picture or video to the bot, it analyzes your request and brings up the recommendation right on your TV. I tested it with a trailer Godzilla minus zeroand not only did it start playing the trailer on the TV, but it also drew a card for the movie and let me add it to my watchlist.

The ability to capture Instagram reels on your big screen has other benefits. I often watch a funny clip on the big screen on social media that I want to share with my friends. I’ll usually look for it on YouTube and if I can’t find it, my next option is to mirror my phone screen to the big screen. With Project Neo, I can just direct that Instagram Reel and it starts playing the video through my Lumio projector. It’s better than awkwardly handing my phone around or having notifications pop up when mirroring the screen.

As good as it is, it’s worth noting that Project Neo is still in early beta with some limitations. It can play videos through many popular apps, but not every app. This is more due to the locked nature Google TVhowever, it remains a notable limitation. Often enough, you’ll still have to manually launch the recommended movie or show.

Elsewhere, an AI-powered bot can sometimes become so slow that you question whether it works at all. This was not a common occurrence, but it happened more than once.

There’s also the fact that the add-on is exclusive to Lumio TVs and projectors. I understand why the company would want to use it to increase the value of its hardware, but it also feels like a missed opportunity. Bringing it to the Play Store could be a compelling reason for people using competing hardware to consider the Lumio ecosystem.

And finally, the elephant in the room – Gemini for TV is set to bring a very similar AI-powered experience to all TVs. The only caveat is that there’s no real timeline for wide availability. However, the chat-based interface of WhatsApp and Instagram is a real innovation and Gemini for TV doesn’t offer it. And that’s something worth leveraging for the benefit of the wider ecosystem.

The philosophy behind what Lumio has built reflects the evolution that Google TV has had to embrace. Google already has all the pieces it needs to build such an experience locally, and it can do it at a scale that a small startup simply can’t match. From what I’ve seen of Gemini for TV so far, it looks like Google is doing the same.

However, if Google integrated its conversational, smartphone-connected AI discovery engine into a TV experience complete with social connections, it would be, for lack of better words, a real game changer.

The native solution will completely remove the deep linking barriers that plague Project Neo or any similar application, allowing AI to not only find a movie, but also start playing it instantly on any service, making remote or hitherto poor voice-based interactions a thing of the past. Project Neo proves that natural language and the smartphone keyboard are key tools for content discovery, and Google should definitely build on that future as we move into the next generation of Google TV.