As TiVo puts the finishing touches on their CES experience, we can clearly see from the “booth” signage (above) that they’re expanding beyond newly introduced native voice control to embrace third parties. While TiVo “Vox” offers far deeper integration and control, including stacked commands, than Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant can provide, those offerings are always-listening (for better or worse) and already installed in many TiVo customer’s homes… and options are good. No word yet on availability, but I assume this will come to all Hydra-endowed retail units and whichever MSOs choose to integrate (who may be limited by regional availability).
Also, as we revealed last summer, TiVo’s going even deeper into the so-called smart home with soon-to-be-released IFTTT applets… of yet-to-be determined value and responsiveness:
Receive a text message if your kids try to unlock parental controls. Automatically pause TV when someone rings your smart doorbell. Turn the TV on to ESPN when you get home from work. Use one of the pre-programmed Applets, and IFTTT can recognize a commercial break and automatically skip right past it, no button press or voice command necessary. These are only a few examples of what’s possible, as TiVo users will be able to choose from a catalog of pre-configured IFTTT Applets, or create their own and program the viewing experience just how they want it.
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Does sleep mode really save enough power to make a difference? If it does, it would be nice to have the Tivo enter sleep mode when the Nest is away and it does not have a recording job to do.
As excited as I am to hear that TiVo is going to integrate with Google Assistant, the following sentence - "Receive a text message if your kids try to unlock parental controls" strikes me as particularly humorous as Parental Controls haven't worked for me since I installed Hydra. Attempting to play recorded shows with Parental Controls enabled results in a P103 error and they do not play. I opened a ticket with TiVo in early November and they've yet to correct the issue. My only recourse has been to disable Parental Controls entirely.
Joe, sleep mode does make a difference, and it doesn’t affect scheduled recordings. It does prevent TiVo suggestions from recording, however.