“Hey Roku, Find My Remote”

In 2018 I joined Roku. One day I was having lunch with our voice UX director and described an idea I’d had for a long time. As luck would have it, a couple weeks later was our all-hands meeting, which included the yearly Roku Hackathon, and he pushed me to enter my idea. After recruiting some talented voice and firmware engineers we formed team First World Problems.

We white boarded our very basic solution and got to work. I hunted down special hardware for hands free voice, and after a furious 2 days of “spare time” sprints (a lie; there was no spare time :D), we completed “Find my remote” and revealed it onstage to the judges.

It was a hit! We won the award for “Most Shippable Hack”.

It turned out the remote team had already been considering the addition of hands free microphones and our use case helped tip the scales in favor. One year later we released the first Roku Voice Remote Pro, now standard with every Roku Ultra player. With hands free remote finder, it’s the first remote smart enough to tell you where it is.