If you are looking for reasons to know if you should choose Dish Network for your satellite television service, and you have the Google ecosystem in your smart home, this may interest you. After Dish announced that it will implement Google Assistant on many of its devices, which means that you can control all aspects of your Dish's hardware, including your DVR, using only your voice, now the company is deploying a software update on Hopper receivers, which allow customers to access the Assistant through the voice remote control, at no additional cost.
To complement this new integration, the company also presented a new Dish voice remote control with the Google brand, which comes with a voice button dedicated to the Assistant. Existing voice remote controls also support integration.
Of course, this is not necessarily great news if you're an Alexa fan, since Dish already had support for the Amazon assistant, and even added more functionality with a new set of voice commands. However, if you are an Android user or a Google Home fan, you will find it much more useful to have the Assistant.
With the addition of the Google Assistant, Dish Network hardware is really hands-free, with commands such as “turn on,” “mute,” “pause,” “resume,” or “tune in to channel 140,” or whatever you want. Commands like "show me Will Smith movies" or show me contest programs are also compatible, which can be useful when you have a vague idea of what you want to see, but you don't have anything specific in mind.
If you do not have the new remote control with Google built-in, you will need another device with the Wizard to use the function, but that should not be difficult. You can use any Google Home speaker, and also your Android phone or even an iPhone. When it comes to Dish hardware, you should not have problems as long as you are running something relatively recent.
This new functionality is available on all Hopper DVRs connected to the Internet, as well as Hopper Duo, Joey and Wally. If you're wondering how to get started, you can find more information in the instructions to set up the Google Assistant to work with Dish, in the publication that the company released when announcing the new feature.
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