The New Year’s Eve champagne isn’t even warm yet, and CES week is already upon us.
The giant annual celebration of consumer tech kicks off the first full week of January as companies across the world convene in Las Vegas to hawk their latest innovations.
As always, WIRED will be keeping track of the deluge of tech announcements. Our intrepid team will be in Las Vegas, bounding around event spaces, trying on headsets and petting possibly several robot dogs, while sharing videos of the most important—and most bizarre—stuff we find. Follow along on our CES live blog or dive into all our event coverage.
Everything Is AI; Nothing Is AI
We are of course expecting artificial intelligence to feature prominently at CES for the third year in a row. Whether the AI race is an actual boom or just a bubble, the entire Earth is seemingly caught up in the trend of packing AI features into every new device.
The rush of companies stuffing chatbots, computer vision, and intelligent sensors into their products has led to a sort of evening out—when products all offer similar features and use cases, they become harder to differentiate.
“Everything is AI now, so nothing is AI,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, who has said this kind of thing for a while now. “It has reached such a point of saturation that simply stating ‘AI’ doesn’t really do anything.”
Competing products may use AI capabilities to do all the same things, but the differences that make one win out over the other may come down to which one can figure out how to best deploy the software.
“It’s really a software maturity story,” Sag says. “But that’s not very sexy.”
Take smart glasses as an example. A heap of smart glasses will be announced at CES this year. Based on the emails already flowing into my inbox, these glasses will have just about anything you’d want—voice-activated chatbot search, sharp displays, instant language translation. But any new specs will have to compete with Meta, which has carved out quite a lead with its best-selling smart glasses. Meta has been able to refine its user experience and design for years now and, so far, its execution is unmatched.
Extend this out to just about any product category and you’ll see the same thing.
“How useful is it actually, but also how good is the software?” Sag says. “Everybody’s going to have some kind of AI—AI earbuds, AI glasses. But if the software sucks, they’re going to be useless.”
Beyond Wearables
Right now, AI is on your face and arms—smart glasses and smart watches—but this year will see it proliferate further into products like earbuds, headphones, and smart clothing.
Health tech will see an influx of AI features too, as companies aim to use AI to monitor biometric data from wearables like rings and wristbands. Heath sensors will also continue to show up in newer places like toilets, bath mats, and brassieres.
The smart home will continue to be bolstered by machine intelligence, with more products that can listen, see, and understand what’s happening in your living space. Familiar candidates for AI-powered upgrades like smart vacuums and security cameras will be joined by surprising AI bedfellows like refrigerators and garage door openers.
Many in the AI gadget business may decide to hold their breath to see what OpenAI’s new gadget strategy looks like. The company has revealed that its first consumer tech products will be personal devices—a home audio player and a note-taking pen, reportedly—though those aren’t expected to arrive for at least another year, and there could be more in store.
