Google May Add Home Workouts to Its Smart TV Offerings

Just like these fitness-obsessed tv hosts Hans and Franz, Google desires to pump you up.

The firm is hatching plans to add fitness-tracking tech and help for interactive residence exercises to its Android TV platform, and to incorporate these software program options into good TVs operating different corporations’ software program as effectively. If the imaginative and prescient comes to fruition, supported good TVs would sync with Fitbit trackers and smartwatches operating Google’s Wear OS—such because the Samsung Galaxy Watch or Google Pixel Watch—which may very well be used to monitor a consumer’s progress by means of a sequence of lounge exercises. It’ll be like watching a Richard Simmons or Billy Blanks video that may additionally observe your reps and measure your coronary heart price.

The specifics of the way it will work aren’t clear, because the information—first reported by Protocol—got here from a private meeting Google held with different smart-home corporations. Still, it’s apparent that Google’s shifting to compete with smart-home health companies like Apple Fitness+, which makes use of an Apple Watch and an Apple TV, in addition to gadgets like Mirror and Peloton’s Guide.

According to Protocol, this initiative may additionally embrace expanded skill to join Nest audio system or different wi-fi audio system together with your Google-powered TV. The report additionally says these modifications will more than likely arrive in 2023.

Google is a pair years behind the large shift to understanding from residence that got here originally of the pandemic. But this providing is also seen as a part of Google’s effort to smush all its merchandise collectively. Fusing smart-home tech with Android, Wear OS, and Android TV means your Google stuff will get used extra typically and in additional mixtures.

Here’s what else you want to know in regards to the week in shopper tech.

Google Calls Out Apple’s Texting

In extra Google information, the corporate put out a confrontational PSA earlier this week calling on Apple to change the basic requirements it makes use of for its textual content messages. Apple converts messages to non-Apple gadgets into normal SMS messages, as opposed to utilizing the extra richly featured RCS standard Google began pushing closely final yr. Because of that, some essential metadata can get misplaced in translation between the platforms.

Google framed Apple’s determination to not help RCS as an influence transfer, blaming Apple for not adhering to extra trendy requirements. In actuality, it’s probably an try to degree the taking part in discipline between Apple and Google when it comes to inter-device messaging, the place the previous enjoys vital aggressive benefits over the latter; iPhone-to-iPhone messaging comes with a dizzying variety of add-ons and particular options that Apple devotees are loath to surrender. It’s additionally ironic to hear such a plea coming from Google, an organization that has launched a dozen totally different messaging apps over time and might’t even preserve the name of its messaging products proper. Undeterred, Google took its marketing campaign to social media, making an attempt to get different individuals to bounce on board. Now Google’s simply ready to get a response that Apple “loved this message.”

Ring Ring

Ring digital camera movies are controversial. The Amazon-owned firm collects data about each its customers and other people caught on digital camera, then can share those videos with law enforcement with out consumer consent. Still, the movies themselves have captured individuals’s consideration. There’s a complete style of viral movies (sure, on TikTok) that revels within the wacky antics of individuals and pets caught on Ring cameras. Now, Amazon is wanting to flip these clips into a complete present.

Called Ring Nation, the present might be hosted by comic Wanda Sykes. The content material might be just about what you’d count on: a set of funny and/or horrifying videos of the type of mayhem that occurs on individuals’s porches and of their yards. The present is produced by Big Fish Entertainment, the identical manufacturing firm that created Live PD, a police documentary present that was canceled within the wake of George Floyd’s homicide in 2020. Ring Nation comes out September 26.