Be smart: get smart devices to run other gadgets in your home
If the world’s largest electronics show in Las Vegas demonstrated anything last week, it was that every conceivable consumer item can become “smart”. Like the cosmos itself, the internet of things (IoT) universe is constantly expanding: underwear, pillows, mirrors and all manner of appliances are connecting to the web.
At CES, described as the world’s gathering place for all those who thrive on the business of consumer technologies, perhaps the most exciting glimpse of this smart future came from Samsung’s Ballie, a tennis ball-shaped robot akin to the rolling BB-8 droid in the newest Star Wars films. The voice assistant — or “life companion” — moves around the home, directing other smart devices and making real-time decisions.
Unlike current assistants such as the Amazon Echo and Apple’s Siri, which wait passively for instructions, Ballie responds proactively to its owner’s mood, activity and specific needs. It can opt to take photos when lighting becomes favourable, for instance, or send a smart vacuum to clean up a dog’s mess without prompting from its owner.
Hyun-Suk Kim, CEO of Samsung’s consumer electronics division, said he wanted to begin the new decade with a vision of “personalised” robots, marking the end of “one-size-fits-all” tech.
“It’s definitely an indication as to where we’re going,” said Geoff Blaber, analyst at CCS Insight.
What is less clear is whether Samsung — which was vague on Ballie’s specs, price and launch plans at CES has the ability to chip away at the dominance of the market leaders.
“This shines a light on the huge trove of data that Google and Amazon have,” Blaber said. “You imagine they are in pole position to make that transition.” Even Apple, he added, “is remarkably quiet when it comes to the connected home”.
Regardless of who wins this market, a host of start-ups is investing in the wider IoT ecosystem, which is expected to grow explosively in the next few years. Voice assistants alone are projected to find a home in 8-billion products by 2023, according to Juniper Research, while the total number of IoT devices is anticipated to hit 42billion by 2025, according to IDC.
Audio Analytic, a Cambridgebased start-up featured at CES, equips smart devices with what it calls “second-generation” audio-recognition capabilities. The company has built a library, Alexandria, containing 15-million sounds that can be used by smart devices to develop “contextual awareness”, allowing them to recognise cues such as shattered glass that may be associated with a burglary.
“Sound is underappreciated. It’s almost like breathing you don’t always consciously [hear it] but it drives a lot of your action,” said CEO Chris Mitchell.
The rapid growth of smart devices has sparked privacy concerns, however, which underpinned a range of discussions on “surveillance capitalism” held throughout the week. Big tech companies were keen to assure consumers that they were committed to transparency and user consent, with executives from Apple and Facebook stressing their use of techniques such as de-identification and on-device processing to minimise personal data collection.
The most compelling take on privacy, however, came from Incite, a fictional tech conglomerate from the dystopian HBO show Westworld. The TV network hosted an “immersive theatre” dining experience led by paid actors posing as Incite employees, who were creepily familiar with intimate details of the guests’ lives, having studied a 600-page dossier, scraped from years of social media posts and other public data.
Steven Cardwell, a marketing executive at HBO, said the stunt was designed to give “a firsthand experience of the promise and perils of a data-driven future”. For many, the experience highlighted how seemingly trivial interactions with Instagram, Twitter, Google or Amazon could be aggregated and abused.
Elsewhere at CES, a yearslong trend continued, with enormous and beautiful televisions causing pedestrian traffic across the showroom floors. Sceptics of 8K technology were silenced by the brilliance of “The Wall”, a 292-inch display from Samsung, while LG’s 25m “The Wave ”— a series of screens pieced together to resemble flowing water — was impressive enough to rival a live aquarium.
According to Steve Koenig of the Consumer Technology Association, a quadrupling of the number of pixels from 4K quality to 8K might be hard to discern on 45-inch monitors, but the effect is radically noticeable when screens grow to 70 inches or more — a size that is expected to account for more than 2-million shipments this year.
Because much of the eccentric technology on display from CES’s 4,500 exhibitors will never come to market, many wonder if the event is worth attending at all. But for executives, the fair remains an important business opportunity: a chance to meet more companies and potential partners in three days than they would otherwise meet in three months of travelling the globe.
“We spend almost our entire marketing budget on CES,” said Mathias Johansson, CEO of Swedish audio technology group Dirac, whose technology is used in smartphones and cars.
“We might meet these companies at other shows but you get sales and marketing people,” he said. “At CES you get the real decisionmakers. ”– © The Financial Times