What a far-field TV microphone does
"Has a microphone" and "is recording everything you say" are not the same claim, and conflating them is how a real privacy question turns into an inaccurate scare headline. Here's what the hardware is designed to do, what it can physically pick up, and — separately — what a 2026 investigation of LG TVs reported.
The standby-audio investigation this section describes was about LG specifically. The near-field/far-field distinction below applies to any brand's hardware, but the specific exploit findings aren't evidence about Samsung, Vizio, Roku, or Sky TVs one way or the other — each model's own page only claims a far-field mic when it's independently confirmed for that model. Vizio ships push-to-talk voice control through its remote, not a built-in far-field mic, on the models checked so far. Roku's "hands-free" Voice Remote Pro is genuinely always-listening, but that microphone lives in the remote, not the TV — a distinct case from either a plain push-to-talk remote or a true built-in far-field array. Sky Glass is the one brand on this site confirmed to ship an actual built-in far-field microphone in the television itself.
Near-field vs. far-field, and why it matters
Every LG remote with a mic button is near-field: you hold a button and speak a few inches from the microphone. A far-field microphone array is built to pick up speech from across a room — typically rated for something like 10-15 feet, more in a quiet room, less with the TV's own audio playing over it. That requires more than one microphone (to triangulate direction and cancel echo/noise) and, critically, it means the hardware is physically capable of picking up your voice without you ever touching the remote. Whether a specific model has this hardware at all is exactly what the verdict on each model page is answering — it's the precondition for everything else on this page.
How wake-word listening is designed to work
The standard design for every mainstream voice assistant — LG's included — is local, on-device wake-word detection. A small, low-power model runs continuously on the TV itself, listening only for a specific trigger phrase ("Hi, LG", "Alexa", "Hey Google"). That local model does not understand language or send anything anywhere; it's pattern-matching against one phrase. Only after it fires does the TV typically start streaming the following audio to a cloud service for actual speech recognition, because on-device hardware generally can't do full natural-language processing.
This is the architecture manufacturers describe, and it's a defensible design: the always-on component is deliberately dumb and narrow, and nothing is meant to leave the device until you've said the trigger phrase. If a TV works exactly as designed, "has a far-field mic" does not mean "is transmitting a running feed of your living room."
What a 2026 investigation reported
A 2026 Gamers Nexus / Level1Techs investigation reported something different from normal wake-word behavior: audio captured and stored locally on a TV while the screen was off and disconnected from the internet, which was then uploaded once the TV reconnected. That's not consistent with "only listens for a wake phrase, only sends audio after hearing it" — it describes storage and later transmission independent of any trigger. It's also worth being precise about how that finding was obtained: it came from a TV the researchers had rooted/compromised, which is a meaningfully different claim than "this is what a stock TV does out of the box for everyone." See About & sourcing for more on that distinction.
What LG's own terms say about voice data
LG's own Voice Information Agreement — the full consent text behind the voice-command feature, normally seen only in the TV's Settings menu — adds some detail. Voice processing runs through a "service partner," Nuance Communications, Inc. (a company Microsoft acquired in 2022), which the agreement says "converts voice commands into text." LG says it retains collected Voice Information for six months before deletion or anonymization. And on the specific failure mode this page is about — a false trigger — LG's own terms acknowledge it happens: if hands-free listening "misinterprets a word or sound as the wake signal," the TV "may not notify you of such collection, but will promptly delete the voice information from the server." So a false trigger can send audio without an on-screen notice, which LG says it then deletes.
Muting the microphone in settings
The same investigation, which again used a test unit the researchers had already compromised, reported one more detail, quoted here from Decrypt's coverage of it, is worth knowing regardless of which model you have: "Researchers muted a TV's main microphone through the settings menu, then pulled a usable recording off a second, hidden microphone the mute switch never touches." The same coverage notes LG provides no hardware option to physically disable the microphone at all — only the software toggle. No outlet has attributed this to a specific model number, so treat it as a reported finding on a modified unit, not a confirmed design across every TV with a mic. If you'd rather not have a TV microphone at all, models marked "No TV mic" on this site don't have one, and neither do TVs without a smart platform.
So what does a "Has mic" verdict actually tell you?
It tells you the TV has hardware that can pick up speech from across the room, which hands-free voice control uses. It doesn't tell you anything beyond what the manufacturer documents about how a particular model uses it, and this site can't test that for every model in the table. Where a model shows "No TV mic," reports about TV microphones can't apply, because the hardware isn't there.