The recent update to the Bose Music App brings new Alexa functionality to the Soundbar 500 and 700 – Bose Voice 4 Video. When you have enabled Alexa, you should get a screen like this:
Get Started will help you configure your TV and Cable Box so that you can change channels with your voice!
If you already have a cable box and TV configured with your Soundbar 500 or 700 or wish to go back and setup Bose Voice 4 Video, go into Amazon Alexa settings in the Bose Music App to complete the setup.
I got this to work with my xfinity X1 cable box after plugging an IR blaster into the Bose 700 and placed it right in front of the box. It’s fairly unusable though for a couple of reasons. 1, you can’t say something like “change channel to CNN”. You have to remember the channel number which isn’t easy considering there’s over 800 of them. Second, it has a pretty big lag since the command is going through the Bose then sending out the command. But what really makes it unusable is that when you say the channel number, it just displays it on the screen. You still have to use the Comcast remote to hit enter for the channel to actually change.
I have an X1 as well, I had to drill down into Settings->Configure Sources-> Cable Box and then I could tell it that I have xfinity and flipping the toggle for confirmation or something made it send the enter as well.
Alexa seems temperamental but I had good success saying "Alexa, watch CNN"
There are some great steps we can try in relation to this. For your first point, please can we try and use the command “Alexa, watch CNN”. That works most consistently with network names. If you are in the US, “Tune to” should work too. In regards to allowing the device to actually change the channel, as mentioned, there is a setting in the app that we can alter. You can find this setting in the Cable Box > Connected Sources screen called “Auto Channel Confirmation”. This will prevent that confirm popup behavior. Please see the attached image for further information on this.
I would also like to clarify what you mean that there is a 'big lag'? Which part of the system is lagging as I would like to feed this back to the development team.
I look forward to hearing how you get on.
As always, please do not hesitate to ask any questions.
I have everything up and working fine now. About the only issue was once or twice when I said “watch CNN”, Alexa said “getting CNN on Hulu”. I then realized that I already had the CNN channel on so I then said “watch CNN on Bose” which seems to reset the commands back to my Sony TV.
I cant seem to get Voice assistant for switching channels to work, I have the QA65 8K Samsung TV with foxtel satellite box and use my Samsung remote as my universal remote when going into devices/cable-satellite box HDMI input is not assigned and when trying to select TV input i get a message saying " sorry, this tv does not support input or is not set up " I dont know what do from here and im assuming this is why i cant get voice switching to work. Can someone help?
Thank you for your post and welcome to the Community!
I’m sorry to hear that you are experiencing some issues with Alexa voice switching. Let me see what I can do to assist you!
I would recommend making sure that you have your Bose universal remote programmed to control your TV, this can be done through the settings menu in the application. I have included a LINK HERE to assist you with how to do this.
