Disruptive technology developers from the Nordics have done it again; this time it is the Finnish based company Rovio who, with their success app “Angry Birds”, has teamed up with Samsung to launch the game on Smart-TV. Without remote control or touch interface you will be able to catapult birds and destroy the vicious green pigs just by using gestures. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could talk to the birds as well?

Rovio launched Angry Birds in 2009 and since then it has become the most popular mobile app game ever with over 700 million downloads and some 200 million active users just last year.  The idea of the game is simple; the player uses a slingshot to catapult birds to destroy green pigs hidden in odd buildings – that’s it.  This simple game has caught on massively with the audience and now we will soon be able to play it on our Smart-TV too.

Already in January Samsung announced that it had partnered with Rovio in order to “bring its worldwide gaming phenomenon, Angry Birds, to Samsung Smart TVs”, and now it seems to happen. According to Tech Crunch the Angry Birds game will work on Samsung’s 2012 LED 7500 Smart TV and up, along with the Plasma 8000 models.

Rovio is not the first Nordic company to bring disruptive technology to the market. Skype, Spotify, Linux and MySQL have all originated in the Nordics and according to the World Economic Forum, who have placed four Nordic countries in the top ten of its ICT rankings, these countries “display a very innovation-friendly environment with a consistent focus on innovation”.

At Artificial Solutions, also rooted in the Nordics, resources are set to offer the market of consumer electronics something even more innovative when it comes to bringing Smart TVs closer to the audience’s expectations. While gesture activation is cool, it would be even cooler if you could talk to your game or TV in exactly the same way as you would talk to another human, using everyday language. We are not talking about giving commands, which is already old news. We are talking about implementing Natural Language Interaction (NLI) capabilities which add a new level of understanding and intelligence to a consumer device.

With NLI you will be able to control your TV just by talking to it. You don’t need to know the exact command for the TV to switch on. You could just say it in any natural way – “Hey TV, turn on”, “Dear Mister TV can you switch on?”, “Please switch on TV”, etc.

So next time you play Angry Birds, have a think about what you would like to say to it. It could be as simple as “Now smash that pig and then switch to my favorite TV-program…thanks!”