u/Willing-Ship-6235

Auto content recognition, or ACR, found on all major brands, analyzes what is appearing on the TV screen, including what comes through HDMI, so it can determine what you're watching and use that information for advertising, audience measurement, and profiling. 

The good news is you can turn it off. 

Look in your TV’s privacy settings for terms like:

Live Plus (LG)

Viewing Information Services (Samsung)

Viewing Data (Vizio) Smart TV Experience / “Use Info from TV Inputs” (Roku TVs, including many TCL/Hisense models running Roku OS)

Automatic Content Recognition (Amazon Fire TV / Fire TV televisions)

Enhanced Viewing Service (Hisense)

Samba Interactive TV (certain Sony Bravia models)

Automatic Content Recognition / ACR (TCL models using TCL’s own services; exact menu varies by operating system)

Find yours. And turn it off.

Called FedEx today and after finally getting through to a human, he greeted me in a deep, slow American accent and introduced himself as "Josh".

After 20 seconds of talking to "Josh" I asked "Is this a real human?" because his voice, cadence, and accent suddenly changed.

He said "Yes I am, how do i sound like?"

I said "Oh I thought it was an AI maybe"

He replied "Oh ya I think it is one of our tools, i'm really sorry"

I said "are you Josh?"

He said "i'm Josh, i'm the real Josh and this would be my real voice, some how my tool... our mandatory tools actually require us to use something.... i'm not actually sure..." then he trailed off and changed the subject but i was obvious what was going on.

What a funny world we live in.

I hate phone calls, but I do a ton of business and part of that is being registered owner of website domains, but what they don't tell you is that the moment you buy that domain, you will receive and onslaught of calls from companies trying to sell you logos, and websites, and marketing, etc. It's really out of control, but the newest update for my s24 ultra gives me call screening feature where you can forward them to your answering service and this brings me tremendous joy! Most never make it through the screening because they hang up before they reveal what they want, the rest I just convert them to a "Text call" and ask what they want using the text to speech feature from the newest update.

I think this is the best feature Samsung has ever bestowed on us lowly introverts.