Android to control home appliances

Google released Android@Home during the 2011 Google I/O conference aiming to allow user to control home appliances remotely with their android phone. This framework allows android phone to discover surrounding equipement with ZigBee and Z-wave technologies. It may be natively integrated into feature versions of the android OS.
Recently, a new Siri-like patent was published by google about controling TV remotely with voice commands spelled to user Android device. The use case is presented in next figure, user input a voice query (e.g. when is senfeld on?) to his device. The device process the query and send it to a cloud service where it will be interpreted. Finnally, the query result will be displayed in the device and TV screen.

It is quite strange how they were able to patent such work, as every block of the process already exist and widely known !

Source Patently Apple