DISH (NASDAQ:DISH) has introduced a voice-controlled remote, featuring voice recognition, a clickable touchpad and backlighting. The new remote is intended to control navigation, search and content selection on Hopper 3 and 4K Joey set-top boxes.
Roughly half the size of a traditional remote control, Voice Remote is designed to interpret natural language, populate search results based on program title, actor or genre, and build contextual searches to narrow options, as desired. It also utilizes voice commands to control basic functions of the receiver, including recording and changing channels.
Voice Remote features two touchpad modes: Default displays a blank touchpad allowing navigation tasks, while the numeric mode illuminates a keypad when channel or password entry is preferred.
The new remote, which costs $30, is designed to control up to two IR devices (TV/AUX models) and features an RF4CE remote control finder.
Voice remote technology has been around for a couple of years from vendors such as Universal Electronics, but has only recently started to go mainstream among video service providers. For example, Comcast (NASDAQ:CMCSA) launched its own voice remote last year.