What’s my idea of heaven? That would be the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each January. A whole week of state-of-the-art gadgets. Can you imagine? And, no surprise, one of the highlights this year was artificial intelligence.
One of these years I’ll attend, but for now I’ve asked my favorite chatbots for some of the best gadgets on the market.
Here are four of the most interesting.
Roborock Saros Z70 robot vacuum. Robot vacuums have been around for years. The smartest ones wander around your home willy nilly and gradually create a map, such that they can then efficiently vacuum your home while avoiding obstacles such as table legs.
But sometimes obstacles are random things like a pair of socks. No problem for Roborock’s Saros Z70, which takes AI vacuuming to a new level. It’s equipped with a five-axis OmniGrip arm that can identify and pick up objects like socks, toys, or stray cables as it vacuums. (Maybe even your cat?) It can recognize over 100 common household items, and you can teach it new ones.
As I write this, it’s expected to be available in April and could cost up to $2,000. AI is nice, but maybe you’d just rather pick up your socks yourself.
Halliday AI Glasses. I’m determined to get some smart glasses soon. I do it for you: I try out these gadgets so you don’t have to. I got an Oculus Quest 2 virtual reality headset a few years ago thinking I might write about it. The 360° nature videos were fun, but I rarely used it and sold it recently.
Hopefully, my experience will be better with glasses that integrate AI. I’d been leaning toward Ray-Ban Meta glasses, but Halliday’s glasses stole the show at CES. They’re stylish and have a featherlight feel, according to reviewers. They connect via Bluetooth to your smartphone and act like a personal assistant, answering questions, delivering reminders, and providing real-time information via text. They can even function as a sort of teleprompter.
They project a virtual 3.5-inch display onto your eye rather than onto special lenses as with other smart glasses. This means, of course, that you can use your usual prescription lenses with these.
The built-in AI assistant can do things such as listen to a conversation and provide an instant summary. Remarkably, the AI Assistant can do real-time translation of 40 different languages. Someone talks to you in another language, and the Assistant serves it up to you in English via built-in speakers.
You can interact with the glasses via voice commands, touch controls on the frame, or a trackpad ring that’s included.
They’re expected to ship this month at a price of $469.
Samsung Family Hub Smart Refrigerator. Be honest. What in your home is most dear to you? Your fridge, of course. And Samsung’s smart refrigerator is filled with AI. It features a built-in touchscreen, voice assistant, and cameras that let you see inside the fridge remotely via your smartphone.
Its AI can suggest recipes based on the ingredients available, help you monitor freshness, send alerts when items are close to expiring, and even create grocery lists. The Family Hub feature can control other smart-home devices, stream music, and display calendars.
And if you’re trying to watch your weight, it will lock the freezer door when you reach for the ice cream. Just kidding.
Samsung Family Hub Smart Refrigerators range from $1,799 to $3,000.
Omi AI wearable. Other than smart glasses, AI wearables haven’t yet caught on, despite a number of much-hyped product launches the past couple years. That may change with Omi, in part because it’s only $89 compared to the hundreds of dollars these gadgets typically cost.
This wearable is an orb about the size of a large button and is designed to be worn around your neck—or attached to the side of your head via medical tape. Seriously.
When prompted, it can follow your conversations, transcribe them, and offer real-time summaries. You can also use its built-in microphone to do things such as answer questions, create to-do lists, and schedule events.
An associated Omi app for smartphones gives you access to features such as transcripts, insights, and action items from your conversations. There’s also an app store for Omi to expand its capabilities, such as a plugin that offers automatic storage of summaries of your conversations in a Google Drive folder.
Perhaps most intriguing is a planned brain-interface module that gives it access to your brain waves. Seriously. In a demo, the developer of the device showed that he could alert the device to listen to a conversation not by speaking the word that he usually uses to wake up the device but by simply thinking about his Omi.
It’s expected to be available in the second quarter of this year. I may give it a try. But you probably won’t see me with it taped to the side of my head.
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