Would you want a TV that knows when you’re present and when you’ve left the room? Google certainly hopes so. At CES 2025, the tech giant previewed an upcoming ambient mode for Google TV devices that will allow supported products to tell when a person is in the room and display relevant content accordingly.
For example, as I approached the couch in the demo room with a Google product manager, the giant screen in front of us showed tidbits such as news headlines, the weather, calendar appointments and photos from a recent trip — without anyone having to speak a command or press a button.
Google TVs will be able to show relevant information when you come into the room.
The concept is far from new. Companies such as Amazon, Samsung and Sony have all offered presence-detection features in TVs in some way, with Sony doing so even as far back as 2009. But Google is hoping that the combination of presence detection and a new version of the Google Assistant that uses the company’s Gemini models will make the TV as much of a living room hub as it is an entertainment device.
“Our vision is that this can be something so much more,” Jamieson Brettle, a product manager at Google, said during the demo. “Like a smart display that sits in your living room, and it’s the largest screen in your house.”
New Google TV products that support both the proximity detection and the Google Assistant with Gemini features will arrive towards the end of the year, while the Gemini upgrade will come to new and existing models throughout the year.
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Google isn’t using cameras to detect whether you’re in the room. Rather, Brettle says, it’s a radar-like technology that senses motion, so it can’t actually see the person or their surroundings. Brettle says the decision to use this technology instead of cameras came down to cost, preserving privacy and power management.
The new Gemini functionality seems like a minor extension of the Google Assistant’s existing Google TV capabilities to make Google’s voice assistant work on TVs, similar to the way it does on mobile devices. The idea is to make it so that you can ask more granular questions with follow up queries and converse with the Google Assistant in a more natural way. In one example, Brettle asked for movies like Jurassic Park that were appropriate for small children, and it pulled up The Land Before Time.
In another example, Brettle showed how the Google Assistant with Gemini’s models can now provide YouTube videos as answers for certain queries, such as when asking for vacation recommendations. There’s also a news brief feature that summarizes news stories and shows where the news is sourced from.
The Google Assistant powered by Gemini models can pull up YouTube videos in results.
Google has been implementing AI into its major products — from its search engine to Pixel phones — over the past two years as generative AI has upended the tech industry. The Google TV Gemini update marks the company’s latest effort to overhaul its core services and platforms with AI. It’s also not the only one trying to bring AI to your home’s big screen; Samsung introduced a few new AI TV features at CES, such as one that provides more information about what’s on your TV.
The question is whether people will find these features truly useful. While TVs can do far more than just stream Netflix or play video games, it’s hard to imagine new AI features like these becoming a major selling point just yet.