Google TV is incorporating Gemini AI to make it easier to converse with a voice assistant as well as generating helpful onscreen information. These new Google TV devices will also feature an upgraded, Gemini-powered voice experience capable of handling more complex voice commands. “You and your family will be able to gather together and have a natural conversation with your TV,” Google announced at CES 2025, where it shared a preview of the new capabilities. The Gemini model also lets Google TV users create customized artwork, control smart home devices and get an overview of the day’s news.

While the remotes for many current Google TV devices have built-in microphones, they require remote control proximity to communicate with the TV. “Upcoming Google TVs won’t have this problem, though, as they’ll have far-field microphones built directly into them,” writes Android Police, explaining that “far-field microphones can capture audio at a distance,” which will allow users “to interact with the assistant on your TV in the same way you do with the assistant on a Google Home speaker.”

Google says the changes are coming in late 2025 on select devicess, and new Google TVs will also have a proximity sensor. “Proximity sensors, a staple in smartphones, allow them to detect the presence of a nearby object,” Android Police reports, noting that “future Google TVs will use proximity sensors so they can sense when you’re approaching your TV and then show you an on-screen hub that contains ‘personalized and informative widgets.’”

Google explains the on-screen hub is still a work in progress, according to Android Police, which writes that “it currently includes widgets for “the weather, a news brief with stories you may be interested in, and your morning commute.”

Asking Gemini to play a “News Brief” will prompt the AI assistant to “scrape news stories from across the Internet and YouTube video headlines posted by trusted news channels, and will produce a brief summary to catch you up on the day’s events,” TechCrunch reports, calling the News Brief feature “a notable step from Google into AI news summaries, a treacherous space for tech companies to venture into these days.”

Various media companies have filed lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity claiming their AI systems appropriate copyrighted intellectual property to generate AI summaries.

AI news summaries have also been prone to “embarrassing hallucinations,” TechCrunch writes, citing examples of misleading summaries by Apple AI and Google’s own Gemini AI.