Google’s Gemini assistant has made its way to Google TV, the next step in the company’s transition away from the old Google Assistant. The pitch is straightforward: better natural conversations, smarter recommendations, and broader knowledge—now built into your TV remote.
There’s a significant hitch, though. Currently, Gemini is only available on TCL’s new QM9K series, a high-end line that starts at around $3,000 at major retailers. Everyone else—from users of Chromecast with Google TV to owners of popular Hisense and Sony sets—will have to wait for a wider rollout that Google said would be in the coming months.
What Gemini Actually Does on Your Google TV
In theory, Gemini can do everything you already asked Google Assistant to do on your Google TV—searching for titles, controlling playback, and pulling in sports scores or weather—but it also responds to more complex, human-style prompts. Rather than bark precise titles, you can instead say something like “Find a show that we can both watch together—me: something dramatic; my partner: lighter fare” and let the assistant triangulate options from across your installed apps.
With Gemini’s wider knowledge, you can ask open-ended queries—not just shouts for amusement. Which brings us to “What’s the new hospital drama everyone is talking about?” or “Recommend an easy dinner I can make in around an hour.” It’s the same multimodal brain Google is working hard to bring to phones and PCs, now on the biggest screen in the house.
Whether living-room ergonomics make you feel like planning a two-week itinerary by voice is another question. But the move is in line with what we’ve seen on wearables, where replacing Assistant with Gemini brought broader language and richer answers—if still often based on more or less the same core user gestures.
The big catch: TCL-only access on Google TV for now
The introduction is restricted to TCL’s QM9K series, which is the company’s flagship Mini LED lineup with bleeding-edge specs—and pricing—a reflection of that. That makes Gemini’s TV premiere more of a platforming exercise than a wide release. TCL is a natural launch partner: It’s already seen as one of the top two TV brands in the world by shipments, based on estimates from industry watchers like Omdia. By working with TCL, Google will have large-scale hardware support without spreading the feature to all compatible devices at once.
Google says more devices will get Gemini later this year, specifically mentioning additional Google TV hardware—including an upcoming Google TV streaming device—and sets from partners like Hisense. Still unknown: whether (or when) budget favorites like the Chromecast with Google TV and low-cost Onn models will be updated. The staggered timing indicates a combination of software readiness, partner certification, and user-experience tuning.
Why the rollout is staggered across Google TV devices
Smart TV ecosystems are famously balkanized: different chipsets, microphones or remotes, far-field versus near-field voice, and uneven update schedules. By launching on one premium series first, it allows Google to keep a tight grip on variables like remote firmware and far-field wake-word performance before scaling up to millions of aging devices.
Then there’s the matter of where Gemini operates. Although the heavy lifting is mostly done up in the cloud, newer TVs with more powerful silicon are able to pre-process audio more quickly and perform on-device tasks without a hitch. Features also have to be aligned with the capabilities of hardware, which sometimes means that new high-end models are supported first with optimizations added later for mainstream sets.
What this means for the TV wars and content discovery
Google is competing against rivals who are already tapping artificial intelligence on the big screen. Amazon hypes up conversational Alexa improvements on Fire TV and trumpets selling more than 200 million Fire TV devices around the world. Roku has more than 80 million active accounts and has been increasingly adding smarter search and discovery technology. For Google, to have Gemini be the front door for content discovery could help increase watch time across services and ultimately advertising and subscriptions.
The long-term payoff is engagement: if Gemini can cut down the “what should we watch?” paralysis with context-aware, personalized recommendations and the whole Google TV experience gets a little stickier. That could be crucial on a platform that (according to Omdia) powers about one-fifth of smart TV shipments between Android TV and Google TV.
Bottom line: Gemini on Google TV starts with TCL sets
Gemini’s long-awaited arrival on Google TV is a significant step up—but right now, you can only enjoy it on an expensive lineup of TCL sets.
If you already own a compatible QM9K, you’re getting Google’s most powerful TV assistant ahead of schedule. For everyone else, patience is the play. The smarter TV experience is on its way; it’s just arriving in a manner more befitting of a pilot episode than a premiere.