Households may soon use smart appliances that can communicate with their owners, once LG's new line of smart appliances becomes available in the market. The South Korean electronics company will put on display its next generation of chatty appliances, which will interact with their owners via the popular mobile messenger, LINE, and LG's HomeChat service, at the 2014 International CES next month.
"Always at the forefront of innovation, LG is continually striving to inspire smarter consumer lifestyles in meaningful ways," said Seong-jin Jo, president and CEO of the LG Electronics Home Appliance Company. "We're excited to be able to bring to CES our smart appliances with the newest communication and intelligence capabilities."
Owners can remotely control these smart appliances via mobile messenger LINE, which supports all major smartphones, including Android, iPhone, Windows Phone, BlackBerry and Nokia Asha, as well as desktops and laptops running Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. And, thanks to HomeChat, there's no learning curve either and communicating with the appliances won't be as crude as to be limited to commands such as "on", "off" or "clean" either. Owners can use regular English or Korean phrases to communicate with the machines and there is no need to learn new commands because everything the owners need to communicate with their smart appliances is on their smartphones and desktops. Best of all, the smart appliances have the capability to talk back.
If you send a text in HomeChat saying "I'm going on vacation", for instance, you will receive an automatic response "Should I convert to vacation mode?" which, when you reply to in the affirmative, will set the vacuum cleaner to sweep the floor at 9 AM everyday, turn on the refrigerator's power saving mode and set the washing machine to run a wash cycle a day before your return.
If you need a little help with cooking, you can also ask the oven for recipe recommendations and it will message you back with the necessary ingredients. Some of the features even go beyond command and response and the traditional features. The refrigerator, for example, has features that go beyond keeping food cold and fresh. It can display photos uploaded via LINE on its LCD panel.
The integration of NFC Tagging and Smart Diagnosis also allows owners to resolve minor issues with their appliances, to avoid the need for expensive and inconvenient home technician visits.
