Millions of TVs to lose popular feature in DAYS – and owners warned it’ll affect other home gadgets too
LG TVs are set to lose the Google Assistant feature at the end of the month as the voice assistant gets pulled into retirement.
Google is replacing the longtime voice assistant with an AI-powered successor, called Gemini, across all its gadgets and apps.
This includes third-party TVs, such as LG and Samsung, which removed the Google feature at the beginning of March.
LG began telling customers at the beginning of the month that Google Assistant would disappear from devices on 1 May.
While the voice recognition service enabled through the microphone button on the remote will still be available, it will be handled by LG’s own voice assistant.
It means users won’t be able to use it in relation to their other Google Assistant devices.
So using Google Assistant to control your TV through a Google smart speaker will no longer be possible.
That change will be permanent too, as LG has decided not to adopt Google’s smarter AI assistant, Gemini.
LG will instead pick up Microsoft’s AI assistant called Copilot – meaning TVs won’t be compatible with Google smart speakers.
For example, Copilot can’t talk through Google’s smart home speakers, but Gemini could.
This is expected to bring disruption to some households’ smart devices network.
Customers have complained about the switch on social media, saying LG shouldn’t be able to remove a feature that was available when they purchased their televisions.
“I wonder if we can get some compensation since they are taking away a feature that they advertise with the TV,” one user said on Reddit earlier this month.
“It’s the only reason why everyone on here bought an LG OLED, for the Google Assistant.”
Last month, Google announced it would be phasing out its Google Assistant by the end of the year.
It will remain on home devices, like Google speakers and displays, for now.
The voice assistant, which has been around since 2016, is being replaced with Gemini – Google’s smarter, AI-fuelled voice assistant.
What is Google Gemini?
You may have heard of Google's Gemini AI tool - so what exactly is it?
Google’s Gemini AI launched in December 2023 and is available online, billed as a way to “supercharge your creativity and productivity”.
Gemini is a multimodal model that learns from a variety of data types including images, text, and audio.
When a user enters a prompt into Gemini, it generates a response using information it already knows or pulls from other sources (often Google services).
While training on datasets, it identifies patterns that help it mimic a human response. As it is continuously learning, Gemini also learns from your prompts, responses, and feedback.
Google has admitted that “Gemini will make mistakes and might even say something offensive”.
The program occasionally cites its sources. If it quotes at length from a webpage, for instance, it makes reference to that page. Sometimes, it generates a URL that users can click.
Gemini has usage limits to reduce traffic, meaning it may cap the number of prompts and conversations a user can have within a specific timeframe.
This number depends on factors like how long and complex a user’s prompts are and the length of the conversation with Gemini. Google will alert you when you are close to hitting the limit for a given period.