The first wave of press announcements surrounding this week’s big Consumer Electronics Show have hit the inbox, and one of the most interesting is a new TV set from Lenovo that runs on Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and responds to voice controls. We’ve been following Apple’s highly-rumored race to bring Siri to TV, and of course, Xbox’s Kinect allows voice controls, too. So it’s no surprise that the TV manufacturers want to get in the voice game, themselves.
The Lenovo K91 Smart TV is the first television running Android 4.0 we’ve seen so far — even beating Google TV’s partners to the punch — and you can use either standard button controls or voice to navigate. “This allows the user to tell the remote control what they want to do, such as accessing thousands of TV apps available running on Android 4.0, or accessing LenovoCloud service to download new upgrades, and also access personal multimedia content or interact on social networks,” said Nick Reynolds, director at Lenovo.
Voice control — if done well — lowers the barrier to viewers interacting with their TV sets, and it’s why the feature will ultimately help fan the social TV flames. The key, “if done well,” is yet to be seen.
Stay tuned for more from CES. Our own Natan Edelsberg will be there later this week.