Samsung showed off a lot of new TV tech at its CES press conference today, including a new version of its Smart Hub that comes complete with a voice assistant that will…wait for it…actually understand Australians out of the box.
It’s called S Recommendation and it’s a Siri-style personal assistant for your entertainment needs. The microphone is stored in the remote so you don’t have to go squawking at a box on the other side of the room and it understands everything from simple Australian phrases right through to colloquialisms. How do we know that’s not just another empty promise? Because the Australian linguistic dictionary for the system was built by the geniuses over at Macquarie University — a world leader in the field.
The whole point of the S Recommendation system is to get new content to you based on your needs, likes and dislikes. After you’ve watched a few things, S Recommend starts to figure out what you like.
All you do to get it going is ask your remote something like: “Is anything on tonight?”. From there, it shows you a list of things you might enjoy based on past viewing from third-party services and Samsung’s own entertainment offerings. It even learns what you like when you specifically ask for it.
The S Recommendation feature will be out on new Samsung smart TVs in the next few months.