Our lounge rooms have become even more central to our lives this year, and Google is expanding the functionality of your TV with the announcement that their Video chat app, Duo, will be available for Android TV soon.
Duo will be rolling out to Android TV devices as a Beta release ‘in the coming weeks’, and will allow you to initiate, or receive both one-on-one and group calls through your TV.
You will of course need a camera if your TV doesn’t have one built-in, but that should be fairly easy to achieve by simply plugging a USB Webcam into a spare USB slot on your TV.
Google didn’t mention Android TV set top boxes like the Foxtel Now Box, Shield TV or Vodafone TV however native webcam support was included in the release of Android 9, so it would be likely that any device running that could support a webcam as well.
Google is positioning this release as a separate, more consumer focused release as opposed to recent updates to Meet, their more business focused video conferencing tool which now supports casting video to Chromecast and Nest Hub smart displays. Though the rumours are circulating that plans are already afoot to merge Duo into Meet – but we’ll have to wait and see how that pans out.
Google hasn’t given an exact time-frame for release beyond ‘coming weeks’, so we’ll be keeping an eye on this one. Until then, I’m off to track down a decent webcam for my TV.
Daniel has been talking about, learning about and using tech since he was able to toggle switches and push buttons. If it flashes, turns on or off or connects he wants to use it, talk about it and learn more about it. Like this article? Buy me a coffee!
A snobbish Wall Street broker and a streetwise hustler have their lives swapped as part…
Samsung is expanding their affordable A-series mobile series with the new Galaxy A27 5G landing…
Tim Cook warned just within the last week that due to pressures on memory and…
Meta has some new smart glasses without the high-end branding, but there's also a huge…
It probably comes as no surprise but Drumsticks are pretty popular in this country but…
MOVA makes the next logical step in their bid to offer a whole-of-home robotics solution…