CES 2024: Smart Home Insights

In 2024, CES seems to be back to where it was in 2019. This year we could feel the energy and excitement on the show floor and in the city. Happy hours and after hours parties were back on the agenda with multiple choices every night. According to the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), there were 135,000 or more attendees, with more than 40 percent international, from 150 countries, regions and territories.

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Outside of CES, Las Vegas also seems to be back and flourishing as a global entertainment destination. The city was still buzzing (and grumbling) after its recent Formula One race and gearing up for its first Super Bowl in a few weeks. 

Transportation for CES feels like it’s improved dramatically – while it is still difficult to move between venues, we didn’t find ourselves ever waiting too long for a bus or Uber. Riding the Vegas Loop made our day at the convention center more pleasant than ever.

With eight and eleven CES events now, we are becoming seasoned veterans at this January Vegas tech pilgrimage and we’re starting to see cycles play out and return. Some companies retreat from the show floor and only demo products at press events and private suites, while others continue to go all out and put a lot of effort into their booths and experiences. Country pavilions are not only in the basement at Eureka Park but increasingly upstairs at the Venetian, and sometimes in both places.

In our space, CES calls us Digital Content Creators and we are increasingly first class press citizens at the event. Many YouTubers and TechTokers break news and broadcast from the show floor just like CNet and the Verge. With just the two of us, we prefer to focus on meeting people and building relationships, and then sharing what we’ve learned when we have time to reflect. The highlight of our week was a dinner organized by one of our fellow creators and getting to spend time with these passionate experts in the smart home space. 

But enough of our experience. Let’s talk about the tech trends we noticed this year.

AI is everywhere

Artificial Intelligence as a buzzword feels like it’s peaking to me, it’s starting to feel like blockchain and crypto from a couple of years ago. The CES images this year felt like they were AI generated and the Chat GPT hype feels ridiculous. Why would I want Chat GPT built into an e-bike or a grill? 

In reality, the best products have been using Artificial Intelligence for years, if that means collecting data from sensors and using it to inform the product decisions and user experience. In the smart home that started with the Nest thermostat and now these types of features are table stakes in that market. Cars gather data that are used in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), that make human drivers safer on the road. Your credit card company analyzes billions of transactions to help detect fraud before you know it’s happened. 

There is no doubt that AI is disrupting our world today and there are certainly a lot of frightening possibilities for some people. But we prefer to remain optimistic about its potential for speeding innovation and making everyday tasks more efficient.

Next Level Sustainability

CES continued its focus on sustainability this year. Last year it felt like we saw dozens of solar batteries and generators and this year many of those companies have expanded into whole home systems with smart panels wired in so you can store your power and customize how you use it. We saw systems from LG, Goal Zero and Geneverse, partnering with Jackery on their solution. Though we really like the idea of getting a Ford F150 Lightning and using it as a battery when you’re not driving it. 

We continue to be fans of hydrogen power and we were happy to see Coplanar at the event again, this time with a better booth space and a smaller, more portable hydrogen generator. They even have a prototype device to make your own hydrogen at home. There is still some work to do on the business model for home use, but the good news is that hydrogen is very dense so you can get a lot more watts in a similar size compared to an electric generator. 

Hyundai also showed they are believers in hydrogen power with a huge booth in West Hall devoted to highlighting their commitment to the technology. They’re investing in all parts of the hydrogen value chain, from generating hydrogen from organic waste and un-recycleable plastics, to developing their own fuel cell technology. We’re ready to test that new Hyundai Nexo anytime, Hyundai, just give us a call.  

Beyond storing and making your own energy at home, one interesting trend that expanded this year at CES is making your own water. Kara Water has a home unit that you can use to make your own drinking water, there is even a version that comes with a coffee maker built in. If you are interested in making water for your entire home, Genesis Systems was demonstrating a prototype that would sit in your backyard and make about 100 gallons a day for your use. It was about the size of four typical air conditioner units and about as loud, but the team is working to optimize that.

Speaking of making your own water and energy, AC Future unveiled a prototype of the eTH, or Electric Transformer House. It’s a 22-foot electric RV that expands out to 400 square feet of living space. It’s covered in solar panels and can make its own water and they claim it will be able to function for about 7 days totally off the grid.

Mobility

CES has had an automotive focus for years, but it’s really transformed into a major theme of mobility. There’s RVs, boats, cars, commercial trucks and people movers, flying taxis and personal planes. On the smaller side there continues to be tons of e-bikes, scooters and the occasional powered skates or smart snowboard, as well as plenty of electric tools and gear including an EV autonomous snowblower. As sustainability and electrification continue we expect this to continue to grow.

Smart Home

Smart Home innovation over the last year seems to have focused mostly on Matter compatibility and less on new features. Most every company at the show was touting their Matter products and including it across all their entire lines, if not now, in the next couple of quarters. It seems like the industry is completely bought into the standard, now they just need to work on the user experience. 

As far as innovation at the event goes, we liked how the Aqara booth had a mix of their new products, like their fingerprint door lock and their smart plug with the Thread border router built in, plus lots of experimental concepts mixed in to get feedback from people at the show. Less flashy but still solid, ThirdReality also showcased new sensors and its new Smart Bridge MZ1 that allows us to integrate their Zigbee devices with Matter too.

As far as the larger smart home companies, we were disappointed with the Ring booth this year. They normally have a pretty big setup that looks like a home, but this year they were crammed into two smaller spaces with such a low ceiling it made us claustrophobic and we had to leave before we had a chance to see if there was anything new. (There wasn’t). 

We strolled through the Amazon experience outside of the show floor for the first time this year. It seemed to be mostly focused on new products using the Alexa Fund to help get to market. There was a cute educational and emotional support robot, the Moxie, and a nice looking smart cooktop from Impulse in development, but otherwise nothing else there really caught our attention.

At the Samsung booth, they are positioning SmartThings as the engine of Samsung’s smart home. It was highlighted in several places at the booth, including a TV focused demo showing the SmartThings 3D map view, a great way to look at all the devices in your home. Samsung also announced a partnership with Tesla to integrate EV charging and solar inverter and Powerwall data into SmartThings, which should be very interesting to the home energy marketplace. 

Samsung also brought back Ballie, a cute rolling robot with AI and some more smart home innovations including a projector. We saw the earlier version in 2020 so we didn’t stick around to watch the updated demo this year, though our booth host told us that this time it is actually going to launch (at some undetermined date). We still haven’t seen a good use case for a home robot other than one that cleans our floors.

Smart Cameras

The Matter Standard does not support cameras, yet, but AI features now seem to be the baseline for smart cameras in the market. If you’ve ever had a smart indoor or outdoor camera, you know that false alerts are an issue, so the big camera brands now all have some form of person detection, pet detection, vehicle detection available, either out of the box or by subscription.

Better technology and more available bandwidth have also made 2K and 4K cameras the norm now, making 1080p HD cameras look outdated. We do wish they would improve the frame rates though since the footage is blurry if the subject is moving.

Interoperability goes large

Last year we visited the Home Connectivity Alliance booth and were impressed with their steady approach to connecting the large appliances in our homes – the refrigerators, washers and dryers, HVACs and more. They did not have a big presence at CES this year but they did release their Energy Management Specification 1.0, which fits right into the trends we saw in home energy management throughout the show.

HCA now has 17 global brands as members and interoperability is coming, slowly as you would expect with these things that will stay in our home for decades. We didn’t see a lot of members advertising this at CES this year, which makes sense, but we got a chance to sit down with Resideo during the show, and we’re really excited about what they plan to do with it.

Resideo became a stand-alone company and the home of Honeywell Home smart products in 2018. They sell both DIY and professionally-installed solutions and have a growing network of service providers for many different home solutions. 

With their background in home energy management, Resideo helped to design the new spec and they will be able to aggregate the data from all these large appliances in our homes to help provide better and more trusted solutions to customers. We’d love to know with more accurate data when our HVAC or washing machine needs service or replacing before we need to make that emergency call.

Designing your home for your devices

Someone visiting the Aiper booth at the same time I did made me realize another trend at CES – having to redesign your home for smart devices instead of the other way around. 

If you get an autonomous lawn mower or snowblower, where does it live when you’re not using it? If you leave it out when it’s finished it will get stolen. Do you have to build a locking shed for it to go to, or do you have to make sure you take it out, turn it on then put it away? And if that is the case, is it really autonomous or just easier on your back? 

Another trend was all-in-one washers/dryer units. These have been popular in Europe for a long time, but the ones we saw at the show from GE Profile, LG and Samsung seem to be better designed to take less time and use less energy. But in most existing homes in the US, we have a space designed for two machines. I see these going well into smaller space and multi-family dwellings, but I don’t see leaving a gap in our house by getting one of these. 

Roborock and Switchbot both now have robot vacuums and mops connected to the water supply, so perhaps we could put our robot vacuum in place of our dryer, or if we’re really ambitious, we could get the Eureka washer/dryer combo with a robot vacuum built in. 

On the entertainment side, after years of trying to blend televisions in by hiding them in cabinets or picture frames, LG and Samsung both featured transparent televisions. In the LG booth they had different setups so you could try to imagine how these might fit into your home design. While the screens are beautiful and they were fun to look at, I will be fine with our built-in cabinet for at least a few more years.

FoodTech fully mainstream

We’ve been following FoodTech for years and remember when we had to go to the Spoon’s separate event to see all the latest gadgets and sample some of the results. We definitely miss the food at those showcases!

FoodTech has had its own presence at CES since the smaller event in 2022 and this year it has grown into a big area with lots of innovation. This year grilling was a huge focus – from grilling a ribeye in 90 seconds with the Perfecta from Seergrills to all-electric backyard and portable grills from Kenyon.

Older brands aren’t sleeping in this space either. Weber refreshed its product line and announced new grills in almost every category, from portables, to pellet, to griddles, electric and gas. We have been using Weber grills for years and adding our own smarts, and they seem to have thought through almost every issue we’ve discovered.

Meater was an early innovator in this space and we’ve been using and recommending their Meater Plus and Meater Block wireless temperature probes for years, since we first saw them at CES in 2019. 

This year they announced their Meater 2 Plus and they’ve improved every aspect of it, from the sensors, to the Bluetooth, to the range. We’re most excited that they increased the max internal and ambient temperature limits – since we’ve had our Meater Plus freak out when it’s too hot inside our grill. Since most every grill we saw at CES seems to have wired thermometers, we’d still recommend this Meater 2 Plus to all our grilling friends.

Health Tech increasingly sophisticated 

Health Tech has also grown into its own area at CES, in the Las Vegas Convention Center, away from all the smart home and fitness tech, which can get a little confusing. Sleep seems to be an area that is covered in both areas. 

We’ve seen lots of sleep monitoring products over the years and some beds that have made positioning and temperature adjustments before, but never anything like the DeRUCCI smart bed. It has tons of sensors and makes micro adjustments to the bed all night long, for each sleeper. Using AI of course. 

Another smart bed we found interesting was from Benzamin.ai in Korea. The video showed people sleeping peacefully through shootings and fires because their bed was recognizing their anxiety and providing pulses to prevent them from waking up. This was a little extreme but it certainly got our attention!

Downstairs at Eureka Park Oliver and Sarah Smith were demonstrating a less scary intervention to help keep your baby sleeping through the night. You clip the Neut on at bedtime and it helps you pick the right pajamas. It also integrates with a smart thermostat to help keep the temperature ideal for baby as well.

Health Power to the people

New health devices at CES are also increasingly giving people more diagnostic capability at home as well. Vivoo, who has been selling at-home urine tests focused on wellness, announced a home UTI test to figure out if they have an infection before they go to the doctor. identifyHer is a wearable for women to monitor perimenopause symptoms so they can be empowered to get the treatment they need. EVOLVE MVMT uses a wearable ankle device to give users feedback on their walking gait, to improve efficiency and help preserve their joints longer. 

Probably the most sophisticated health tool we saw at the show was the Withings BeamO, a small device coming soon that you can use to do your own at home check-up, including heart rate, pulse oximeter, ECG and a stethoscope. You can keep the readings yourself or share them live with your doctor, great for remote visits. 

Aging Tech becomes more elegant

Aging tech has also evolved into a larger focus and this year the AARP booth was bigger than ever, with presentations and lots of companies showing off new solutions. 

This year we saw more innovative and elegant solutions to help keep seniors safe at home longer. The Nobi Ceiling looks like a regular elegant lamp but it can detect falls and get help if needed. The Italian-designed MyMemo in Eureka Park looks more like an elegant toaster than a pill dispenser. Less elegant looking but very practical was the Empower Clean Care System from Bemis, an easy to use elevated bidet seat that provides a three step wash and moisturizer for people experiencing incontinence. 

Summary

Home tech at CES has evolved well beyond smart light bulbs and cameras and we continue to find so many interesting smart living solutions to learn about every time we go. We will continue to try and share as many of these new innovations with you so you can decide which ones you want in your own home.