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Is the TV remote control soon to become extinct? Can it become forever lost down the back of the couch and no one will care? The remotes for the stereo and climate control could potentially go and join it in the obsolete tech graveyard in the not too distant future too.
In partnership with apps, smartphones and tablets could gradually take over the job of the remotes that control home entertainment. And they won't only take control of in-home entertainment either. Smartphones are already taking control of home lighting, climate control and security systems.
Although smartphones themselves may not have that much time to shine as the controller of the home either, as technology will increasingly be able to listen and react directly to the human voice and body movements.
And as Gilles Boisselet, creative partner at global production partner UNIT9, points out, smartphones don't lend themselves to group activities. “TV remotes are an antiquated piece of technology. They don’t embed software. They’re ugly. And they’re unhelpfully proprietary. But what can we use to replace them?
U.K.-based smart-TV platform YouView is currently trialing integrating Amazon's voice-activated virtual assistant Amazon Alexa with its systems. YouView's executive creative and brand director, Fani Sazaklidou, explains what this entails: "YouView announced its partnership with Alexa last year, and since then we have been working intensively to develop a search functionality that reflects the way people use their voice to search for content more naturally."
What YouView has already discovered is that the entire search process changes dramatically when the remote control is taken away. "Viewers tend to hunt with voice and graze with a remote," reveals Sazaklidou. "Voice search requires different meta tags, as the terms that viewers use with voice are much wider and more unpredictable from the way in which text-based search is conducted.
"We also see that the adoption of voice search for TV is not instant, it takes some getting used to, but when viewers adopt a voice-first approach, they tend to switch permanently, only occasionally using their remote. As more devices like Alexa make their way into our living rooms using voice to control our entertainment will only become natural. I predict that this will seem like a slow transition and then will happen all of a sudden."
Looking back to the death of the cassette tape, new technology often takes over quicker than expected. “It might seem strange at the moment, but it won’t be long before remotes are retired and voice takes over," predicts Mark Lippett, CEO of embedded voice and audio company XMOS.
"After all, the voice is the most natural way for us to communicate. In the future, you won’t need a remote to make your new TV work. You will just say 'find Poldark, series one, episode four' – from anywhere in the room - and the TV will know exactly what application or platform it needs to open for that specific TV series, providing a simpler, richer experience for consumers.”
There are still some cheerleaders for the TV remote control, however. Peter Docherty, founder and CTO of personalized content recommendations engine provider ThinkAnalytics, says that it is not about to become obsolete because different people like to navigate tech in different ways and they always will.
"There’s no one best way to do everything – the remote has a place for channel zapping and controlling functions with shortcut buttons. Even with voice, you can still speak into the remote; in fact, the combination of near-field and far-field microphones is necessary.
"Voice, tablets, and mobiles all offer different benefits. But you wouldn’t want to do everything with voice, even if you could. And having to get your mobile, unlock it and launch the TV app just to change the channel or adjust the volume is not going to be the best user experience."
It seems that the TV remote control is not going to be consigned to the scrapyard just yet, but it's unlikely to dominate home entertainment systems forever.
