Lumio's Project Neo turns your WhatsApp chats into a TV remote

Lumio has opened public beta for Project Neo, a new feature inside its TLDR app that lets you find and play shows on a Vision TV or Arc Projector by just messaging on WhatsApp or Instagram.

Skip the remote typing, skip the app-hopping. Say what you want to watch, in one of nine languages, and it shows up on your screen.

Why your TV now takes WhatsApp messages

Most people don't discover shows on their TV. They discover them in a group chat, a reel, a screenshot someone sends at 11pm. Then they sit down to watch and can't remember any of it. Neo is built around that exact moment. Type or speak a title, an actor, a genre, a mood, even a plot you half-remember, and it finds the match.

Say you're bored, and it'll throw trending picks at you instead. On Instagram, you can forward a poster or trailer clip directly to Neo, and it'll identify the title and push it to your TV."WhatsApp and Instagram are where India already types, voice chats, and shares, so that's where Neo lives too," said Kailash Sankaranarayanan, Co-Founder and COO of Circuit House Technologies. His pitch: TV hardware races have plateaued around similar specs, so the real upgrade left on the table is software that gets what you mean.

CEO Raghu Reddy called the beta a way to let Indian users shape how TV discovery should actually work, instead of Lumio guessing in a lab.The beta is live now via a Play Store update, but only for Lumio Vision TVs and Arc Projectors. Nine languages are supported at launch: Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Odia, Marathi, and Kannada, with more coming. Full details and beta access instructions are at neo. lumiolabs. ai.