From Alexa to robots to a bunch of buttons This year marks the 50th anniversary of CES, née Consumer Electronics Show, a tech industry spectacle that swarms Las Vegas every January. It?s where the VCR debuted in 1970, the CD player in 1981, the Nintendo gaming console in 1985, and so on. Fast forward to 2017 and the buzz is, perhaps unsurprisingly, all about artificial intelligence. Self-driving cars. Voice-activated robots. All things smart home.
Seeing how these topics have everything to do with where and how we live, I was sent to scope out CES for Curbed, with eyes especially peeled for smart home tech, a nebulous space?or cloud, as one might say?filled with gadgets of ever-ballooning variety.
Taking up 2.6 million square feet spread across the Strip, with some 170,000 people in attendance, CES was like a small city in itself. And this year, huge smart home booths were everywhere to be found, from brand showcases by the likes of LG and Samsung, to a dedicated Smart Home Marketplace with more options than the average consumer?me?knew what to do with. But I went, I saw, and I tried to understand the state of the smart home. Here?s what I?ve gathered from walking the show floor and listening in on panels of experts.
Hey Alexa! (Your new best friend")
Anybody who showed up at CES noticed that Alexa, Amazon?s AI voice assistant, has broken free from the company?s own wireless voice command device, Echo, into a million other products. Our sister site the Verg...