Deutsche Telekom Smart TV Becomes Smart Home Hub Powered by Magenta Voice Assistant
Deutsche Telekom has upgraded its Magenta TV into a smart home hub relying on its Magenta voice assistant. The new Telekom Home Experience app turns the smart television into a large smart display with control over the home Wi-Fi, smart devices, and access to Magenta’s information and services.
Magenta Home
The Telekom Home Experience pulls together several features common to smart displays and smart home apps. Viewers can see local weather and news on the screen and display their photos from the Magenta Cloud while gaining more control of their home’s internet connection. A new button on the Telekom Home Experience app will restart the router remotely, while another will let users test the connection and find out how well it is running, any problems, and recommendations to fix them. The new feature also includes access to the Ask Magenta chatbot named Frag Magenta to answer questions about products and any issues with them. There is also a guest network button to bring up a QR code for easy access to the internet for guests.
“The services now launched are the first step toward a world in which Telekom services such as TV, smart home, router, Magenta Cloud or voice control magically work together,” Deutsche Telekom spokesperson Verena Fulde explained. “These functions are just the beginning and the basis for future convergent and personalized functions that customers can look forward to in spring 2022. Other services will then follow.”
DT Evolution
Magenta initially controlled Deutsche Telekom smart TVs via smart speakers until last year when the voice assistant became available on the Deutsche Telekom MagentaTV app. MagentaTV is where Deutsche Telekom houses its streaming and other media services. The latest round of features fully centers the voice assistant’s control over the home on the TV. The company already has a few access points for Magenta, including the entry-level €50 Magenta Mini smart speaker early in 2020. At the end of last year, “Magenta” became the new, simplified wake word instead of “Hallo Magenta” and added Apple Music via Alexa Voice Service.
More than a quarter of German adults owned a smart speaker at the beginning of the year, a 34% growth during 2020, according to Voicebot’s data. As the devices become more ubiquitous, the next stage of the competition for Deutsche Telekom is over the features and screens of German voice assistant users. Alexa is already an option for a voice assistant on Deutsche Telekom’s smart speakers so that it could focus on augmenting its specialties, especially media, rather than try to replicate everything Amazon and Google have built. The same philosophy holds true for its smart TVs, so making Magenta and smart home control easy and accessible is a logical move in the still unsettled melee for German smart homes.
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