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Microphone? They put microphones in TV remotes nowadays?
Yes, it's for "easy searching." I dunno about current offerings, but even Roku boxes from five-ish years ago had them; you'd hold a button and talk into the remote.
They still have them. This was from a Roku stick but has been repurposed for Flirc. The devices it was once connected to had a productive meeting with a pipe wrench.
The mic is right below the power button and you held down the mic button above the play/pause button to use the voice search.
Roku remotes are perfect for Flirc dongles. I repurposed one for Flirc as well. The Roku device it was attached to is long gone 😅
I wonder if the microphone can be repurposed for similar shenanigans? 🤔
Why? What can I say to remote? "Switch to channel 15?" Isn't it easier to press a button?
It's for searching (so you don't have to type words on a virtual key pad with a remote with no alpha-numeric key pad).
It would actually be OK, if they all had a hardware switch that cut power to the mic, but I doubt that how they work.
Having the mic on the remote always on and streaming back to the host would drain the battery in about a day.
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How often are you switching channels these days??
It's to search instead of using the on-screen keyboard via remote.
Streaming services have a search feature, but you have to scroll through each letter of the alphabet to spell out whatever you’re looking for. The microphone does away with both this process, and privacy.
It would be okay if it was local, and a simple voice recognition could work. Smart phones have that ability when the connection isn't present. But they're going to make it cloud driven because that's easier and opens up more "features".
yeah, but maybe you're blind and mostly just listen? I don't know.
Yeah? It's to use voice controls. Been a thing even before "smart" TVs.
Have you been living under a rock? Microphone-equipped remotes have been a thing for years.
Yep. Smart TVs doing Smart TV things.
People will literally buy anything that invades their privacy
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I'd love to see a guide about how to remove the microphones from the tv. I'm not brave enough to just open up my TV hoping I can find all the bugs in it.
Just change your wifi password and never let it online ever again
Putting tape over it or glue in the hole is probably far easier to manage for the average person, without destroying the remote in the process. 😅
That doesn't work, though. Sound will penetrate that fairly easily. It'll be muffled slightly, but not enough to do anything.
Probably would do little to prevent it from listening though.
I remember Samsung did this on my TV with a talk function in the remote. This was a 2012-model. So it's technically not new that companies do this, but what LG has done here worries me.
I've got one myself now, but I live in bumfuck nowhere, and have blocked the MAC address for the TV. Got an HTPC connected it with Jellyfin and the whole shebang.
Oh don't worry. These tech companies pretty much all do this. If the TV's aren't listening and even watching us. It are our iOS and Android based smartphones and watches. Our in home smart cloud connected "security" camera's. Our 'smart' doorbells, fridges, ovens. Our Windows/Macbook laptops. Our cars.
We're already long passed the dystopian threshold.
The worst part is, the vast majority of people chose for this and socially shunned people that never opted in for this 1984 bullshit.
LG is nothing, last year Apple settled for spying on their users. Nobody cared. Facebook has been charged for this, multiple times, nobody cares considering the popularity of Whatsapp and Instagram to this day. Everybody goes wild about the new iPhone, haha, it's an absolute privacy nightmare that's spying 24/7.
LG is just a popular target now because they're Asian.
is this a "the best time to plant a tree" thing or is there something particularly terrible about today and tv microphones
GamersNexus just dropped a pretty damning video on LG's data collection practices. Their TVs record absolutely everything from their microphones and cameras (if equipped - some are), sniff out everything using wifi and bluetooth within its vicinity, and sends it ALL back to LG. It does this even when the TV is "turned off", storing the data until it's reconnected to the internet. And yes - that includes the remote's microphone.
My theory is that this is why modern "smart" TVs end up grinding to a halt after a short-ish period of time when not connected to a network. Data just sits and fills up the internal storage until there's no more space for other processes to function. This happened to a Vizio we bought recently - I ended up factory resetting it and suddenly it worked perfectly. Never connected to the network.
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data privacy
Or ... just don't connect your TV to the internet.
Except they can still scan for and communicate with any nearby BT/WiFi connections, and some sets even have 4G/5G modems embedded now.
Vlan-ed it years ago, running on some old 2021 firmware. And it so snappy and clean. (I only use Wake On Lan for the TV, to sync up with the PC)
Hey LG, if you're listening, where the hell is my remote?
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