LG Partners with Microsoft to Bring Real-Time Voice AI to ThinQ ON Smart Home Hub
LG Electronics announced a partnership with Microsoft to integrate Microsoft Voice Live technology into its ThinQ ON smart home hub. This integration enables a speech-to-speech AI agent capable of fluid voice conversations, including real-time interruption features that allow users to ask new questions mid-response. The partnership demonstrates the practical deployment of low-latency, end-to-end voice AI in commercial and consumer hardware. By supporting natural interruptions, the system moves smart home interactions away from rigid turn-based commands toward more realistic, conversational experiences. LG plans to launch ThinQ ON equipped with Voice Live by the end of the year while delivering software updates to existing users. Beyond residential smart homes, LG aims to deploy this voice assistant technology in B2B environments such as hotels, offices, and retail stores.
## BACKGROUND
LG ThinQ ON is a smart home hub designed to act as a central controller for home appliances and IoT devices across LG's ecosystem. Microsoft Voice Live is an Azure Speech API that combines speech recognition, generative AI, and text-to-speech into a single unified interface. This unified approach eliminates the need to manually orchestrate separate AI pipelines, significantly reducing latency for real-time voice interactions.