Lumio Launches Project Neo, Which Controls Lumio TV Using WhatsApp and Instagram Messages

Lumio has officially launched the public beta for Project Neo, which is an innovative, AI-driven content discovery platform. Built inside the company’s existing TLDR app, Project Neo completely changes how users interact with their entertainment setups.

Designed to eliminate the need to browse through multiple streaming apps to find something to watch, or to type while searching using a TV remote, Project Neo allows users to search for and play content on their Lumio devices by sending AI-driven language text or media messages through messaging applications such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

Available from Thursday, July 2, 2026, through a Play Store update, Project Neo aims to simplify content discovery by allowing users to interact in natural language. Project Neo further supports natural language queries in nine Indian languages. The feature is currently exclusive to Lumio Vision TVs and Lumio Arc projectors.

How to Onboard and Connect Devices?

Setting up Project Neo is a straightforward and swift procedure. The public beta went live on July 2, 2026, and users can access it immediately through a quick series of onboarding actions:

• Update the TLDR App: Users have to open their Lumio Vision TV or Arc Projector, update the TLDR app, and follow the beta access instructions available at neo.lumiolabs.ai.

• Message TLDR on WhatsApp: Once set up, users have to open WhatsApp on their phone and message the TLDR account. Furthermore, they can search for content in plain language, by title, actor, director, genre, mood, language, or even a half-remembered UserScript. One can also ask for recommendations, and Neo will surface trending picks across supported platforms. Neo currently supports nine languages, which include WhatsAppinglish, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Odia, and Kannada, with more to follow. The company says support for additional languages will be introduced in the future.

• Using Instagram: Moreover, the user can directly share a post, poster or screenshot of a film directly with the TLDR account on Instagram. Neo identifies the title from the image and sends it to the TLDR app on the user’s Lumio device and makes it ready to play on screen. The software analyzes the image or video to identify the corresponding title and transfers it to the connected display.

• Watch it on TV: Neo finds the content and sends it directly to the user’s Lumio device once it receives their request through WhatsApp or Instagram, with no remote navigation, no app switching, and no scrolling through menus required. The content plays on the user’s TV or projector from where they had left the conversation on their phone.

Hardware to Intent-based Software

The release of Project Neo marks a strategic pivot for Lumio, emphasizing software and user experience over traditional hardware specifications. Lumio is focusing its engineering efforts on the cross-platform gap between where users typically discover content, which is social media feeds and chat conversations, and where they consume it, which is the living room television.

This provides an insight into the fact that the smart TV industry increasingly converges on uniform hardware standards such as larger displays, faster processors, and higher refresh rates where Lumio is focusing on the content sector.

According to Kailash Sranarayanan, Co-Founder and COO -it House Technologies, the company wants to reduce the friction involved in finding something to watch by using platforms that people already use every day, such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

Availability

The public beta for Project Neo is available starting today, June 2, 2026. Users can update the TLDR app via the Google Play Store. The feature is currently exclusive to the Lumio ecosystem, supported natively on Lumio Vision TVs and Lumio Arc Projectors via the TLDR App.

Step-by-step onboarding instructions for beta access, along with the full, real-time list of supported features and platform integrations, have been made available on the official portal at neo.lumiolabs.ai.

Bottom Line

Lumio CEO Raghu Reddy said the company believes that software-driven experiences will play a bigger role in the future of televisions than hardware specifications alone. He further added that a step-by-step beta will help Lumio gather feedback from users and further refine the platform. WhatsApp and Instagram are already where India types, chats and shares, so that is where Neo lives too. Thus, the feature would prove efficient for the users as they can directly send messages through Whatsapp and Instagram and search for movies and TV shows.