2018 CES review…5 year `Main theme` of technology change

Every year, the Consumer Electronis Show (CES) in Las Vegas, USA, will go beyond the world ICT industry in the year to become an exhibition that can measure the evolution of new and innovative convergence industries including the automobile industry. It is going. Until this year, the main theme of CES for the past five years has been the convergence of heterogeneous industries such as electronics, ICT, and automobile which combine Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI) in simple smart appliances. At the CES this year, AI was spotlighted, experts say, but it is not the level of AI service consumers feel for their skin yet. Accordingly, next year, CES is expected to come up with a real AI service competition that can reach consumers` skin.

In this year`s CES, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Japan`s Sony, Panasonic, and Haier in China, have unveiled this year`s theme as a smart home and smart city using AI and IOT rather than promoting a single new product.

"A company which shows new products at CES has disappeared a lot," a representative of a large home appliance company participating in the event said, "We organized the pavilion with similar concepts such as AI and IoT.”

In fact, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics also released some products such as micro LED TV and three new robots at CES, and more focused on announcing their own voice recognition AI platform, such as Bixby and Thin-Sky. Baidu and Alibaba, China`s largest Internet companies, also introduced the AI platform in distribution.

Other consumer electronics companies and even automobile makers are actively applying AI services such as Amazon Alexa and Google`s assistant to their products, and two voice recognition AIs have emerged as CES heroes. This shows that the age of convergence of AI, home appliances and automobiles has arrived.

This move by home appliance companies started last year. At CES 2017, LG Electronics has linked smartphone `Smart InstaView`, home robot Hub Robot, and Coway `s Air Cleaner` Air Mega `with Amazon` s speech recognition AI Alexa. Samsung Electronics also applied its own voice recognition technology to the Family Hub 2.0 refrigerator and QLED TV.

For the past three years, CES core theme has been IoT. In 2016, LG Electronics and Volkswagen introduced a futuristic electric car that connects home appliances and cars with IoT. Samsung Electronics, in partnership with BMW, demonstrated the technology to remotely control smart home devices and cars at home and in cars, and to show the trend of popularization of IoT. In 2014, the automobile industry focused on the convergence of heterogeneous industries such as home appliances, and the cooperation between industries based on mobility connectivity was active.

Company officials attending the exhibition said that this year, there has been a vigorous convergence between hardware makers and content service providers, and that next year they will evolve into a more advanced and complete AI. "Google has strengths in search, Amazon is optimized for shopping killer content, but Samsung and LG`s AI also have strengths in consumer electronics," said an ICT industry official. It will accelerate the rate of AI evolution while competing. "

AI and robot-car convergence are also considered to be one of the points of observation of CES next year. Following LG Electronics, which has been showing AI robots since last year, Sony and Honda, a car maker, have exhibited robotic products this year, and it has been suggested that the evolved AI service will spread to robot platforms.

Las Vegas (USA) = By Park Jung Il comja77@


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