On the big screen

It’s been a long wait for Australians wanting to use the Google Assistant features touted on their smart televisions, with Google demonstrating its smart assistant running on a Shield TV at its I/O developer conference back in May 2017.

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Google Assistant running on a television offers almost all the same functionality as when speaking to a Google Home, including answering search queries, controlling smart home gear and accessing Google services such as calendars and shopping lists.

Rather than hang on your every word, Google Assistant waits for you to press a button on the remote. While this seems to defeat the purpose, considering you're already holding the remote, it alleviates some privacy concerns while also eliminating the need to constantly say "Okay Google".

Google Assistant on your smart television can both show and tell, like the new smart speakers on show at I/O this year. When answering your queries it can display weather forecasts, maps with travel routes, shopping lists and other useful information.

Ask for more

Unlike Android TV-powered smart televisions, LG’s webOS handles some basic requests using its own ThinQ smart assistant. With the latest firmware update, more complex queries are now seamlessly handed across to Google.

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When running on a television, Google Assistant now lets you access its wealth of third-party skills, with LG demonstrating the Woolworths and eBay apps at its press briefing. Thankfully purchases must be confirmed via your smartphone, to eliminate the risk of little fingers spending up big online.

The ability to present written information while still showing video creates possibilities such as displaying live sports scores across the bottom of the screen while you watch a movie.

Searching the free-to-air TV guide on an LG television is set to improve as LG plans to ditch the unreliable Electronic Program Guide embedded in Australia’s broadcast signal in favour of more dependable online alternatives.

ThinQ about it

Unfortunately LG's new voice features still fall a little short of those offered by Google Assistant on Android TV; mostly because ThinQ refuses to hand entertainment-related queries to Google's smarter assistant.

LG's ThinQ insists on handling queries beginning with "Play" rather than handing them to Google Assistant. ThinQ is flummoxed by requests like "Play Stranger Things", insisting that "there are currently no programs broadcasting stranger things". Instead, it offers up a link to the show in a list of options.

Unlike on Android TV, "Play the Rolling Stones on Kitchen speaker" will also leave you in the lurch, with ThinQ unhelpfully searching for the entire phrase on YouTube.

ThinQ is also stumped by contextual questions. You can't call up a list of video clips and say "play the first one", as ThinQ just searches YouTube for "the first one". Yet when LG's television hands a question like "Which is the world's tallest mountain?" to Google Assistant, it remembers what "it" is when you ask the subsequent question "how tall is it?"

Stay in control

Just like a smart speaker, Google Assistant on a television can control other home entertainment like the Fetch TV.

It’s worth noting that, unlike Android TV, LG’s webOS smart televisions don’t appear on your home network as Chromecast streaming points. Thankfully you can still stream to webOS from some mobile apps such as Netflix.

You can't even ask Google Assistant to play music on an LG smart TV, as ThinQ stubbornly searches YouTube for "the Rolling Stones on Spotify Music" even if you have the Spotify app installed on the television. There needs to be a way to force ThinQ to pass some requests to Google Assistant.

There can be only one

Unfortunately, Google Assistant doesn't support Voice Match on televisions, which means neither webOS nor Android TV can recognise specific voices in your home.

This means, at least for now, the television assumes every spoken request comes from the primary Google account holder, potentially exposing sensitive information such as calendar appointments. LG lets you disable calendar access and says that Voice Match support could come down the track.

For now Google Assistant is a handy way to bring Google's smarts to the big screen in your home, but LG's smart televisions still need to learn a few lessons.