LAS VEGAS – TiVo has been making a lot of changes to its user interface lately, and it’s not all just on the surface. Under-the-hood they’ve added some hooks and been hard at work putting all the pieces together for some pretty impressive third-party integrations. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant integrations are pretty far along, and TiVo is close to getting certifications for both of those, likely being available before the end of February. More than just turning TiVo on and off, these voice assistant integrations allow for fairly granular controls, including channel changing, play/pause, rewind, and even commercial skip. IFTTT integrations take this one step further, allowing bidirectional communications. This means TiVo could tell IFTTT that the “press D to Skip” icon is on the screen, and that could trigger an IFTTT skill to send the “skip” message back to TiVo. Yep, auto-skip is available and I’ve seen it in action! Even better news: IFTTT integration will work all the way back to Series 4 (Premier) units and doesn’t require the new Hydra UI (except auto-skip actually will require Hydra, at least at launch). Look for more from TiVo soon.
Check It Out: CES – TiVo Demos Alexa, Google, and IFTTT Integrations, Coming in February