If you're interested in getting more quickly and WANT to write software, you can have the Raspberry Pi control most televisions over HDMI-CEC using libcec [0],

If you're interested in getting more quickly and WANT to write software, you can have the Raspberry Pi control most televisions over HDMI-CEC using libcec [0], and then you just need the voice recognition stuff mentioned above (Rhasspy [1]). I had to do something similar (minus voice controls) to keep my existing remote's volume controls working with an analog volume device [2]. [0] https://github.com/Pulse-Eight/libcec https://github.com/Pulse-Eight/libcec [1] https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy [2] https://rkeene.org/viewer/tmp/cec-volume.cc.htm https://rkeene.org/viewer/tmp/cec-volume.cc.htm