LG embraces and showcases AI in their home appliances at IFA 2024

If there was a buzz word to describe this year – and perhaps last – it would be the letters AI. LG like many tech brands has been working with AI in many of it’s devices for many years but today must demonstrate to the world their entire AI approach and ecosystem.

It’s the new space race, but for consumer tech companies and in the world of AI – who does AI best?

LG’s approach is in a way similar to Apple’s – take the letters and build a brand around it, LG is calling it “Affectionate Intelligence“.

At IFA here in Berlin this year they’ve split their large booth up into zones to demonstrate this approach across the home and for various consumer segments.

Their hope is to demonstrate the scalability and interoperability of their AI platform across their own and third party services and devices.

The LG ThinQ ON is a big part of this, a home hub designed to understand the user preferences. Over time it should help learn about your routine, preferences and behaviours to personalise the smart home experience.

An understanding of natural language is key to the future of AI applications and LG say the ThinQ ON has that, allowing you to control appliances and IoT devices with conversational commands.

One zone at the LG booth is called the “The Second Youth Home” which is about highlighting the power of voice recognition to enable coordination between home appliances – LG thinks this and other applications will help enhance the lives of the elderly.

A strangely named “Affectionate Home zone” showcases AI solutions for families with kids and pets. Adjusting device settings to meet the needs of kids, things like a sleep mode to dim lights turn on a starlight effect and perhaps music or white noise to get kids off to sleep. They even talk of the Hub Learning by using Generative AI to create stories from your kids drawings!

For the pets, it’s about clean floors and fresh air, as well as the new LG AeroCat which is a cat bed and purifier in one creating the ultimate rest area for your cat and a fresh atmosphere for the cat’s owners!

Keeping up with the somewhat inspirational names for their “zones” is the “Delightful Home zone” where LG is demonstrating food experiences with personalised recipe recommendations and nutritional analysis.

And the “Smart Green Home” is of course, about the environment, with a self-sustaining home featuring a air to water heat pump and AC system and the use of LG Ai to optimise home energy usage in real time adjusting device settings and schedules to suit.

“Our Affectionate Intelligence Home solutions at IFA 2024 will enable customers to experience the ease of the Zero Labor Home, where they can enjoy a life free from mundane household chores,” said Lyu Jae-cheol, president of LG Electronics Home Appliance & Air Solution Company. “We will continue to advance the AI home era with our Affectionate Intelligence solutions and state-of-the-art core technologies.”

We’ll hit the ground today to check this out and highlight any individual products we see, but all of this is to say, using fancy words and terms – that LG is going all-in on AI in their home appliance line up, so expect to hear much more about that in the short to long term future.

 EFTM’s coverage of IFA 2024 in Berlin is funded by our business and our ongoing supporters, including LG