Slash energy bills with new TV button coming to millions in surprise upgrade – and it solves common bedroom problem too

GOOGLE is creating a clever button that could slash energy bills for millions of TV owners.

Telly sleuths have spotted early signs of the feature on Google TV – one of the most popular systems that powers televisions around the world.

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Google TV and Android TV are Google creations that serve as the “home” for your telly, serving up your apps and settings.

It regularly receives updates from Google adding new features to help improve your television – even after you’ve bought it.

Eagle-eyed gadget fans at Android Authority have dug into the test version for one of these updates, and uncovered a clever upgrade.

It lets you set up an advanced sleep timer for your telly so that it won’t keep playing all through the night.

Falling asleep while watching telly is very common – even if what you’re watching isn’t boring.

Currently Android TV does offer a very basic sleep timer, but it’s very hard to get to, buried deep inside your TV’s energy settings. One clever shortcut is to ask the built-in Google Assistant to “turn off TV in X minutes”.

But the new version will let you schedule sleep timers, add time to them, pause it, and even get notifications for when it’s about to run down.

There’s no word on exactly when the feature will arrive, but it would be very handy.

For a start, not having your TV running all night will save you money on energy bills.

It also means you’ll get a more restful night’s sleep.

And you don’t run the risk of something loud coming on the telly that wakes up your partner or other people at home too. So it may even help you dodge a few rows at home.

The Sun has asked Google for comment and will update this story with any response.

IPHONE SLEEP TIMERS

While you wait for that, there are some clever iPhone sleep timers to try too.

The first is built directly into the official Apple Podcasts app.

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Just go into it and start playing something.

Then look at the media playback screen in the app: you should see a small crescent moon icon in the bottom-right. It’ll have three “z”s next to it.

Tap it and you’ll be able to set up a sleep timer for that podcast.

You can choose times ranging from five minutes right up to an hour.

But the more useful option might be to choose When Episode Ends.

This will kill your podcast once the episode is over, which has the added benefit of meaning you won’t sleep through a load of episodes that you wanted to listen to.

There’s a very similar feature that works on music for your iPhone too.

It’s built into the default iPhone Clock app, and you may well have missed it entirely.

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This will let you shut off music after a certain amount of time.

So you could play peaceful rain sounds, for instance, and then have it shut off so it doesn’t run all night.

This will save energy and hope give you a bit of peace too.

First, begin playing some music.

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Then go to the Clock app and head into the Timers tab.

Set a timer for a length of time – for instance, you could choose one hour.

Then on the button for When Timer Ends, don’t choose a sound. Instead, scroll all the way to the very bottom.

Tap on the Stop Playing option and then start the timer.

Once it ends, the timer won’t make a noise. It’ll just switch your music off entirely. Handy.