Roku’s rolling into fall with some serious upgrades. Instead of just another batch of performance improvements you’ll never notice, the Roku TV operating system is getting some meaningful tweaks that will make your living room (and maybe even your backyard) entertainment center smarter, faster, and more fun.
The company’s latest software update supercharges its voice assistant, revamps how you discover content, enhances the mobile app’s wide functionality, and throws sports fans a bone with live scores and game reminders. There’s also a brand-new Roku-powered projector hitting Walmart shelves this week.
A wide selection of useful upgrades
Across basically the entire interface
Credit: Roku
Headlining the enhancements, Roku Voice just got an upgrade to its digital brain. The assistant now uses AI to answer natural-language questions about movies, shows, and actors, right on your TV screen. It’s almost like having IMDb baked directly into your Roku. You can ask things like “What’s ‘Barbie’ about?” or “How scary is ‘The Shining’?” and get a quick summary without pulling out your phone. Follow-up questions work too, so it actually feels conversational instead of a one-and-done command prompt.
On the content side, Roku’s putting discovery front and center. Search — already one of the platform’s most-loved features — is expanding into more parts of the interface, including the Live TV Zone and, soon, the Live TV Channel Guide. A new Ways to Watch button adds instant streaming options directly from trailers, eliminating the endless app-hopping we’ve all come to hate. Roku’s also highlighting where each title is available to stream, prioritizing services you already subscribe to.
Credit: Roku
Sports fans get a proper upgrade this time in the form of Live Scores and Reminders. You can check ongoing scores right from game tiles, or hide them entirely if you’re not into spoiling outcomes. And if there’s a game you want to make certain you catch, the upgraded alerts have you covered. Just set a reminder, and Roku will ping your phone when it’s time for kickoff.
The Roku Mobile app is also becoming more of a full-blown control center, with new shortcuts for captions, sleep timers, Find My Remote, and even a daily trivia feed. Ratings and personalization will now sync across devices, too, helping the software further fine-tune its already useful recommendations and make it easier to find new content.
And for streamers on the go, Roku’s debuting the Vankyo Roku TV Smart Projector H500R — a portable 1080p projector with Roku OS baked in, Bluetooth audio, and a simple remote. It’s basically a pocket-sized home theater that’s even more portable than its recent D1R Cube offering, available this week at Walmart. All these updates roll out in the coming months, just in time for fall premieres, as well as football and basketball season.
