Tech pushes boundaries of home living with CES showcase

Companies at the Consumer Electronics Show are now talking more about smart homes and artificial intelligence.

2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is on in Las Vegas, Nevada. CES is one of the largest tech shows on the planet, showcasing more than 4500 exhibiting companies representing the entire consumer technology ecosystem. Picture: AFP

Samsung, LG and Hisense were among the big TV firms that announced new devices at the world’s biggest consumer technology show in Las Vegas.

In past years, TV had dominated the show as big tech companies experimented with curved TVs and 3D; both proved a failure. Now the sets have become larger and moved from full high definition to 4K, and now 8K sets.

In 2020, there is a changing of the guard. These companies at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) are now talking more about smart homes and artificial intelligence than just TVs.

But there are still new TVs on offer. Samsung announced the Sero TV, a 4K set that lets you consume content in portrait mode, like we do on smartphones, and announced an 85-inch 8K QLED television that without a bezel or frame around the TV looks as though the pixels could fall off the sides.

It was also keen to talk about kitchen products: a family hub fridge that uses artificial intelligence to identify what is in your fridge, suggest recipes and guide you through the process, even helping you plan meals ahead.

The Samsung family hub now features artificial intelligence to identify and know what is in your fridge, suggest recipes and guide you through the process, even helping you plan meals ahead.

You can see inside the fridge through the 22-inch display and also find out its contents from anywhere in the world. You can also control your smart home, see who is at the front door and watch content.

Samsung also demonstrated a robotic life companion named Ballie. The yellow sphere, introduced by president and CEO of the consumer electronics division H.S. Kim, has built-in sensors, a camera and AI to interact with you and can act as a personal fitness assistant.

Sebastian Seung, executive vice president at Samsung Research, discusses Ballie, a small round companion robot that can react and interact with its owner. Picture: AFP

Korean rival LG only briefly mentioned new TVs when it announced it would pump out more top-of-range OLED TVs in 2020 and bring six new 8K TVs to market.

Users will be able to monitor other smart devices in their home via their TV. This will be supported by Amazon Alexa and will be available in 144 countries.

LG mainly spruiked its plan to bring artificial intelligence to a range of its white goods: washing machines, dryers, fridges and ovens.

It says its new washers will detect clothing types and select the optimum cycle for the clothing load inside, meaning you would not have to manually select cycles yourself. If you buy a matching LG dryer, the washer will send the clothing settings to the dryer, which again will save you from manually programming it.

You’ll get an alert if the washing machine notices that you are using too much powder. It will alert you to a potential problem in a dryer if it notices a change of air flow.

It announced a proactive customer-care service that will offer maintenance hints based on your usage, and will alert you to issues that it thinks will develop down the track.

You will also be able to choose from hundreds of thousands of recipes via a smartphone app and send cooking instructions from your phone to the new LG ThinQ ovens.

LG laid out its dreams about how artificial intelligence will develop over time — its next generation robot vacuum cleaner would learn from its own mistakes and by observing what you drink in the mornings, order it when you run out. Whether humans want to cede that degree of control to AI is another matter.

Sony at its press conference didn’t talk about new TVs at all. A few years ago Sony would show off new TVs, new cameras and lenses, and new audio devices. None was present at its media conference. Its cuddly robot dog Aibo, Sony’s pride and joy two years ago, was nowhere to be seen.

Instead it talked about its keen interest and involvement in driverless technology, mentioning a partnership with Lexus and Toyota.

While Sony remains closely involved in media, movie production and gaming it has changed emphasis under new CEO and president Kenichiro Yoshida.

The one bit of headline news was an announcement that its PlayStation 5 gaming console will be released in time for the US “holiday season”, which means around the middle of the year.

China’s Hisense, meanwhile, says it will bring its dual cell TVs to Australia — these are TVs that comprise two LCD panels joined together. It says a greyscale layer sits behind a colour layer and effectively blocks light from pixels that need to be darker. It says the result is a display that matches the quality of OLED TVs.

However, even it is moving into the connected appliances sphere following acquisitions of Toshiba, Gorenje and Asko.

It seems the big electronics firms are wanting to be leaders in the connected device smart home market and the TV market is just part of a much bigger story.

Chris Griffith is attending CES in Las Vegas courtesy of Hisense. Geoff Quattromani is attending the conference courtesy of Jabra, LG, HERE Technologies and Uber.