Implication notes
Standby, microphones, and voice pipelines
Voice features use a different data path from ACR. Agreements cover wake-word monitoring, remote-button sessions, speech-to-text vendors, and (in 2026 reporting) what happens in standby or offline.
Keep ACR and the microphone in separate mental buckets. ACR, in the captured LG and Hisense texts, fingerprints *program audio* from the sound pipeline. Voice agreements cover *your* speech, wake words, and often a named speech-to-text vendor (Nuance on LG and Samsung snapshots; Google or Amazon on TCL).
**What LG’s Voice Information Agreement says.** Voice collection happens when the feature is activated. If the TV is off, a blinking light is supposed to notify you. Hands-free wake-word false triggers may collect audio that is “promptly delete[d]” from the server. Retention is described as six months. The same household-consent representation appears as in the ACR agreement.
**What LG’s September 2026 statement adds.** Wake-word detection is local; no wake word means no transcript, store, or transmit. Hands-free may keep listening for the wake word in standby. Sessions are short (on the order of 10–18 seconds in the statement). LG says voice is *not* uploaded later when the TV was offline. That last sentence is a direct response to 2026 reporting (Gamers Nexus / The Verge / others) that described local audio stored while disconnected.
This tracker does not adjudicate the lab claims. It keeps the agreement, the statement, and the implication note so a reader can see where they conflict.
**Practical controls.** Decline the Voice Information agreement; use a hardware mic switch if the model has one; disable Hands-free Voice Control; prefer pressing the remote mic button only when you intend to. Isolate the TV on a guest network either way.
Excerpts in the corpus
LG · voice-recognition · Mar 1, 2024
“If voice function is activated while your Smart Media Product is off, it will notify you by blinking the light on Smart Media Product. If your Smart Media Product provides hands free voice recognition feature, such feature might misinterpret a word or sound as the wake signal.”
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LG · company-statement · Sep 12, 2026
“If a user has chosen to enable Hands-free Voice Control, the TV may continue monitoring only for the wake word while in standby mode. If no wake word is detected, the audio is processed locally, promptly deleted, and is not transmitted to LG servers.”
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Samsung · voice-recognition · Sep 13, 2026
“some interactive voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service provider (currently, Nuance Communications, Inc.) that converts your interactive voice commands to text”
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TCL · voice-recognition · Jul 18, 2025
“When you use the voice assistant function, your voice data will be processed by Google or Amazon. Your data will be directly transferred to Google or Amazon.”
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