Every third booth at CES showed off some new AI product or other. If you wanted to find a robotic lawn mower, throw a rock.
Perhaps you like the idea of controlling your home appliances with your voice, but aren’t super keen on a data center processing recordings of you. Fair enough. The trade-off for most smart home conveniences is relinquishing at least some of your privacy. Today at CES, I saw a line of voice-controlled home appliances from Emerson Smart that adjust power and setting via voice commands. But commands are recognized on the devices themselves, not carried through Wi-Fi and processed elsewhere.
If you’ve ever bought a bag of spinach only to come home and realize you already had a bag of spinach, you may appreciate this fridge.
As power gets more dicey, personal energy generation only gets more appealing. Shine’s compact turbine isn’t going to power your house any time soon (though Rachel Carr, the company’s co-founder told me they have plans in that direction) but it can suck up the energy required to refill a smartphone in as little as 17 minutes. Of course, what it can generate depends on wind speed.
I know IKEA is all about small, efficient spaces, but their meeting room inside the Venetian during the company’s first-ever CES was the same size as my (not large) living room. Plenty of people were as excited as I was to see what the Swedish designers brought with them to the show and the room was thick with humans.
Even if you bring home as few bags as possible — using reusable bags, carrying purchases home with your own two hands — soft plastics sill accumulate. I certainly have a collection with one flimsy plastic sack filled with dozens or hundreds of others. I plan to do something with it… eventually.
New tech at CES often makes categorization hard. Is Cozyla’s latest device a digital family calendar, a TV or a smart home hub? After seeing it, I’d say the answer is, yes? Cozyla calls the Calendar + Max the “largest interactive hub in it’s category.” And indeed, it’s the size of a big flatscreen, but the main interface is just like any other Cozyla device, an Android-based family calendar and planner with shared schedules, notes, meal plans, and chores. It syncs with Google, Yahoo and Apple calendars as well as Outlook, and it will run apps from the Google Play store.
I met up with a few people from Google at the Encore Villas during CES (which is just 2,500 feet from my hotel but took 28 minutes to walk to, thanks to Vegas’
It's not the first of its kind, but a few key differences set Fraimic apart from other E Ink art displays. Aura, Switchbot and others have something similar. But unlike other versions, this one requires no subscription, lets you swap out the surrounding frame and doesn’t require an app to upload the art. Instead, a built-in mic picks up your idea, sends it to OpenAI and creates an image that pops up in a few moments on the screen. The on-board accelerometer even knows whether the device is in landscape or portrait orientation, and applies the correct format.