alt Hacker NewsAs someone who hasn’t owned a television in decades, why would a TV even need a microphone in the first place?
How many other household devices have a microphone whose primary function is orthogonal to recording audio?
Replies
Voice recognition is really useful when searching. It's annoying to type with a TV remote. Also you can just say what you want like "play breaking bad on Netflix" and it'll just do it.
Edit: also the mic in the remote has a function to calibrate the speakers to the room (correcting for the impulse response of the room basically) which can make the audio much better.
Every speaker can be used as a microphone if the circuitry is added to do so.
1984 purposes.
Of course it is needed in a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen ...
Some "smart" TVs could do skype in the past, I'm not sure if they needed external headsets of worked with builtin mikes.
There are lots of good reasons that are used to paper over the abuse cases.
Microphones in tvs are a useful accessibility feature when they enable voice commands for the user, and allow them to be used as voice assistants.
They also enable tvs with a camera and microphone to be used as video calling or audio calling interfaces. Used well we get star Trek view screens, used poorly we get little brother monitoring.
For those interested, it turns the tv into an interactive terminal for voice and camera powered video games, which are becoming more popular.
Unfortunately advertising and tracking incentives drive the abuse cases to the top and will crush the positive use cases :(