I let an AI take over my Google TV and it solved the biggest streaming problem

Doomscrolling is a concept that we all know very well. netflix You may have a seemingly endless list of movies to offer, but finding one you want to watch always seems completely out of reach. Too often, I find myself sitting on the couch, remote in hand, trying to decide what to watch as the night wears on. The paradox of modern streaming is that the more options we have, the harder it is to decide on something, turning what should be a relaxing evening into a tedious exercise in decision paralysis. Me? I usually end up on YouTube. But I digress.

Recently, Lumio, an Indian hardware company, proposed an interesting solution to exactly this discovery problem. Nicknamed Neo Projectis an experimental AI agent designed to bridge the gap between the devices we use to discover content and the screen on which we view it. And the best part is that it does it using apps you use every day.

By connecting an AI agent directly to your Google TV Through WhatsApp and Instagram, Project Neo promises to remove friction from the living room entertainment equation. After spending a week letting a chatbot dictate my nightly viewing habits, I’m convinced that this approach to content discovery is exactly what the smart TV ecosystem was missing. More than that, however, it might be one of the smartest AI use cases I’ve come across recently.

The biggest flaw of modern smart TV platforms is that content discovery doesn’t work. The second biggest flaw is that it is still largely gender dependent. There is a lack of nuance and understanding that a masterful horror film like Midsummer has more in common with the British classic The wicker man and even less with any horror that Netflix is ​​selling today.

Transmission interfaces They are designed to maximize engagement time, with users expected to explore dense grids of promotional tiles, watch autoplay trailers we didn’t ask for, or scroll through multiple menus using a remote control that hasn’t changed much in recent decades. This ignores the fact that discovery happens on our smartphones, through forums like Reddit and social platforms like Instagram.

Because our discovery habits are completely mobile, it’s a challenge to translate that discovery to the big screen. If a friend texts you a recommendation for a movie, you have to remember the title, figure out what streaming app it’s on, grab the remote, open the app and manually type the name of the movie or use voice search, which often fails. Google Assistant can help reduce some of this friction, but in my experience, it fails more often than not.

Project Neo turns this dynamic on its head by moving the entire discovery process to the smartphone, using an interface that everyone already knows how to use. The system relies on a companion app that runs on the TV called TLDR. You then follow a fairly standard QR code-based pairing process that connects a WhatsApp chatbot to your account. That’s all. You can now chat directly with the bot, using text and voice input, and it becomes a conversation input device for your TV.

The beauty of this integration is the simplicity. Users don’t need a new app on their phone. Project Neo brings information to where you already are. No need to stream or switch between screens. Simply enter the name of the content you want to watch and TLDR will display it on the screen. From there, simply tap the thumbnail and, as long as you’re logged into the service, the movie will be displayed. If not, it will still tell you which service the content is available on, along with beautiful metadata including posters, banner images, and a brief summary. You’ll even find information about the cast.

Of course, the functionality goes far beyond a simple smartphone-based media launcher. There’s a surprising number of features built in here, including a full recommendation engine. And that’s where the intelligence of AI begins to appear. During my testing, I asked for movie recommendations similar to the classic epic adventure. Lorenzo of Arabiaand obtained accurate recommendations such as Ben-How and The last emperor.

The actual experience of using Project Neo feels incredibly smooth in practice. Instead of searching for a specific title, you can talk to the WhatsApp bot exactly as you would talk to a friend, thanks to its support for slang and abbreviated communication. You can ask the robot to show something as basic as trendy movies or something as complex as a non-obvious 90s neo-noir crime thriller with high ratings and with at least one Oscar-nominated actor. Suffice to say, he gave me solid recommendations right on my projector screen. You can even follow up with additional queries, such as filtering out movies longer than 90 minutes. Very good.

If you don’t feel like typing, you can send a voice note to the bot and it will handle the requests seamlessly. Furthermore, requests are not limited to just cinema. You can search for movies, music videos, and sports scores. For the latter, the TV displays title cards with game highlights, but so far it lacks the ability to include you in an ongoing match.

Beyond standard text queries, Project Neo addresses another massive disconnect in the modern living room by integrating social media links into the TV experience. Much of my discovery today happens through Instagram. I have a collection full of interesting world cinema to watch. But that’s the problem with Instagram; that collection languishes on the platform because I forget to check it every time I’m looking for a new watch.

With Project Neo, you can link your Instagram account to the platform. Every time you forward an image or reel to the bot, it analyzes your request and displays the recommendation directly on your TV. I tried it with a trailer to Godzilla minus zeroand not only did it start playing the trailer on the TV, but it also opened a card for the movie, allowing me to add it to a watch list.

That ability to display Instagram Reels on your big screen has other benefits as well. Too often I see a funny clip on social media that I want to share with friends on the big screen. I usually look for it on YouTube and if I can’t find it, my next option is to mirror my phone’s screen to the big screen. With Project Neo, I can forward that Instagram Reel and it starts playing the video through my Lumio projector. It’s so much better than awkwardly swiping my phone or having notifications pop up while I’m mirroring the screen.

As good as it is, it’s worth noting that Project Neo is still an early-stage beta with some limitations. You can start videos through many popular apps, but not all apps. That has more to do with the closed-in nature of Google TVbut it is still a notable limitation. Quite often, you will still have to manually start the recommended movie or show.

Elsewhere, the AI-powered robot can occasionally become so slow that you wonder if it’s even working. It wasn’t common, but it happened more than once.

There’s also the fact that the companion app is exclusive to Lumio TVs and projectors. I understand why the company wants to use it to improve the value of its own hardware, but it also feels like a missed opportunity. Bringing it to the Play Store could make it a compelling reason for people using competing hardware to consider the Lumio ecosystem.

And finally, the elephant in the room… Gemini for television is set to bring a very similar AI-powered experience to all televisions. The only caveat is that there is no real timeline for wide availability. That said, WhatsApp and Instagram’s chat-based interface is a real innovation and something Gemini for TV doesn’t offer. And it’s something worth criticizing for the benefit of the broader ecosystem.

The philosophy behind what Lumio has created represents the exact evolution Google TV needs to take. Google already has all the pieces necessary to create an experience like this natively, and could do so at a scale that a small startup simply can’t match. Based on what I’ve seen of Gemini for TV so far, it looks like Google does pretty much the same thing.

However, if Google integrated a smartphone-linked conversational AI discovery engine natively into the TV experience, complete with social links, well, that would be, for lack of better words, a real game-changer.

A native solution would completely remove the deep linking hurdles that plague Project Neo or any similar app, allowing AI to not only find a movie but also start playing it instantly on any service, and make remote or hitherto rather poor voice-based interactions a thing of the past. Project Neo proves that natural language and the smartphone keyboard are the ultimate tools for content discovery, and Google should take advantage of this future as we approach the next generation of Google TV.