Despite wide availability and vast improvements in speech recognition, most folks rarely use voice assistants. And when we do talk to Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri, it’s often just to ask about the weather. But there are a few voice commands you could be using today to enhance your TV viewing experience, because, let’s face it, navigating with a TV remote is a pain.

Imagine you’re halfway through an episode of Andor The doorbell will ring if you are watching your favorite television show or pause the action. To pause and rewind, you can speak a command. You can also use voice commands to launch a streaming app, check who directed the show, or even find out what the actor on screen just said. 

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You Will Need

All the best TVs and TV streaming devices have some form of voice control built in. The most versatile are Google Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Roku voice commands, but others offer at least some of the same functionality. Your remote can support voice commands if it has a microphone icon. 

Sometimes, you can use your smartphone, smart speaker or display to control the TV. As long as it’s in the same space and is connected to the Wi-Fi network, this will work. This is handy if you don’t want to have to reach for the remote and press that microphone button before you issue a command. 

There’s usually some setup required for all this to work, like adding your smart TV to the Google or Apple Home apps, Samsung SmartThings App or by installing Roku. With Amazon’s Alexa, you can pair smart speakers to your Fire TV by opening the Alexa app, tapping Learn More > TV & VideoSelect your Fire TV and choose the Echo speaker that you would like to use for controlling the TV. You may also need to link your streaming services accounts, but that’s usually part of the setup for streaming devices like Chromecast with Google TV.

Everything You Need to Know

You can use simple voice commands to communicate with your service. These include:

• Play
• Pause
• Resume
• Do not stop
• Start playing from the beginning
• Volume down
• Volumes up

Watch What You Like

Because it’s such a pain to type anything using a remote control, voice commands are great for launching apps, specific shows, and movies, or finding content that you might like. These are some commands you might try:

• Start Netflix
• Open Hulu
• Sam Rockwell: Show me your movies
• Play Stranger Things Netflix
• Please show me sci-fi television shows
• Action movies for 4K
• Check out all Martin Scorcese movies

With Google Assistant, you don’t even need to know the name of the movie, you can say things like, “Stallone, boxing movie” and Rocky will pop up, or “funny vampire movie” to get How we work in the Shadows.

To the Future and Back

You can use voice commands to be more precise than a remote for fast forwarding or rewinding, although it is sometimes difficult. These are some examples:

• Pause for 10 seconds
• Jump ahead 30 seconds
• Go back 10 seconds
• Move fast forward for three seconds
• Play next episode