To make our lives – and the lives of our families – easier, DISH announced its newest upgrade to the family network. On Tuesday, Nov. 14, the company released a new voice remote that ships with all Hopper DVRs. This new addition has motion-activated backlighting and customizable buttons to fit our family’s needs.
According to the company, the upgraded remote interprets natural language to control navigation, search and content selection on compatible set-top boxes, which is different than the former voice remote that was unveiled in July 2016.
And the best part? New DISH customers will receive this new piece of technology at no extra cost. Former customers can upgrade to the new voice control remote for only $20.
“Voice control will now come as a standard feature on DISH remotes shipped with our Hopper set-top boxes,” said Niraj Desai, DISH vice president of product management. “In the not-so-distant future, we’ll begin to navigate our TV experience the same way we navigate human conversations. Our new voice remote is not only a technological stepping stone as natural language processing and machine learning progress, but it’s also an effort to bring customers along in the process by increasing their familiarization with voice control.”
The customizable remote can now allow families to easily access their favorite programs including Netflix, video on demand and most importantly, parental controls. The remote is also compatible and can be used with Amazon’s Alexa.
