If they'd improve the software and stop dishing out underpowered processors in TVs, that'd help. I have an LG that's a few years old and there's nothing "smart" about it. It should have been sold as "slowTV" instead of "smartTV".

I am saddened that the data needs to fly off to the other side of the world, particularly when dictation and speaking to a device can be done offline: see Dragon Naturally Speaking, Apple offline dictation on OSX, and a Nokia from 15 years ago that would respond to simple voice commands like BLUETOOOOOOTH (yes, you had to shout it), plus the dumb Bluetooth interface in my car that I have to stop and speak to in order to pair devices with it etc.

Actually basic voice recognition is done in the TV itself. By 'basic' I mean things like switching it on or off, changing channels, adjusting volume or navigating the menu. Also this is limited to a few selected languages (most notably English and Korean, not sure which others). As soon as you get to things like entering text into text inputs or want to control your TV in 'unsupported' language, this gets delegated to cloud services.

That's hardly an argument to shit on your customers privacy.

Even your iPhone when you ask Siri questions sends your data to be processed in the cloud.

People are buying a TV because they want a TV, not a mini computer. Why would TV manufacturers want to jack up the price of their product with non-essential TV components to have onboard voice recognition?

They are already jacking of the price with nonessential components by creating a smart TV. Why shouldn't they jack it a couple more dollars (because that's really the difference) to have on that responds quickly?