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Telly’s free ad-supported TV will use ChatGPT for its voice assistant

Telly, the company giving people free 55-inch 4K TVs as long as they’re willing to live with persistent ads on a second screen, is previewing a “Hey Telly” voice assistant that will be based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT, at least at first. Users will interact with it on the TV’s second (lower) screen, and the company says it “will come to know and recognize the Telly owner” over time and offer personalized recommendations to users. The company didn’t say when the feature will be available.

The existing SoundHound-powered voice assistant is limited to more mundane tasks like setting timers, changing picture modes, or answering simple questions.

Telly also says other household users can opt to have the chatbot personalized to them, offering the example of a chatbot that knows you’re on a vegetarian diet and keeps that in mind when you ask for restaurant recommendations. The announcement says that the goal is for the assistant to make the TV “a valuable, interactive family member.”

The second screen is the star of Telly’s show.Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge

Telly didn’t get specific about how its TV is doing other than to say it’s shipped “thousands” of them to customers. The company is at CES 2024 to pitch its TV’s advertising performance, telling brands that usage is “more than twice the national hourly average” and that viewers remembered the ads on its second screen more than those in traditional commercial breaks. The company cited a more than 60 percent recall rate for a Kia ad campaign it ran.

“We’re transforming the biggest screen in the home into the most powerful retail channel since the internet,” said Ilya Pozin, Telly’s CEO.

The new pitch about using AI for personalization is one we’re hearing across CES this year as we dive into a second year with ChatGPT and companies start to figure out how they’re going to make chatbots a part of their products. (See LG’s “Affectionate Intelligence” or Samsung’s latest Ballie concept.) Telly’s chatbot might be useful, but it will probably help along the company’s plan to use the TV to gather your data and sell you things, which it hasn’t been coy about.

Telly also says that using the TV’s integrated camera for Zoom calls has been a hit with early users and announced a new “Zoom Watch Party” feature that puts it on the second screen, letting you watch content or play video games on the main screen while you video chat on the second screen using its integrated camera.

Meanwhile, T-Commerce is the name for its promised purchasing feature. When users interact with an ad on the second screen, they’ll be taken to a web browser for the retailer, with the option to save their payment info to the TV for easy checkouts.