The future of the smart home: Qualcomm talks about household robots and smart refrigerators
At CES 2025, Qualcomm unveiled its vision for the next generation of smart home technology in the age of artificial intelligence, focusing on chatbots, smart media systems, robots and smart refrigerators. All of these innovations are enabled by Qualcomm's powerful QCS8550 chip, which promises to be the foundation for a new level of home technology.
As smart home technology evolves, its main goals remain the same: saving time, reducing labor costs, improving safety and health, and creating new entertainment options. Qualcomm aims to contribute to this field by offering a powerful smart home chip that has low power consumption and supports advanced communication technologies. One of the most promising trends is the use of neural networks that operate locally - thus avoiding the transfer of data to the cloud and protecting it from possible leaks.
Qualcomm, which already has solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT Solutions Framework) in its arsenal, presented new tools for smart home platforms at CES 2025:
- Chatbots with artificial intelligence to control household appliances;
- the optimization of interactive multimedia systems with AI;
- home robots.
According to Qualcomm, 2025 will be the starting point for a new era of smart homes, where devices equipped with powerful processors and AI will be able to solve complex problems that go beyond simply connecting to a home network. The refrigerator, the TV and the household robot will learn to interact with the user on a whole new level. To this end, Qualcomm has developed a chatbot that can conduct interactive conversations in real time and uses a rich language model to generate responses. Unlike the widely used smart speakers, this chatbot can be integrated into a variety of devices. The prototype was developed in collaboration with Thundercomm and uses a QCS8550 chip with the ability to run AI, camera data processing and other multimedia components locally.
The smart refrigerator with computer vision detects what groceries are available, suggests recipes, creates a shopping list, orders groceries online and reminds the owner to pick them up on the way home.
The heart of the system will be a smart TV that can be controlled via voice commands to change channels, adjust settings, and control other smart home devices. The TV will also offer features for spontaneous TV watching with friends, real-time translation, movie recommendations based on your mood, or help planning a family outing. All of these features are powered by the QCS8550 chip, which enables voice command recognition, multimodal language models, computer vision to recognize objects, people, gestures, and faces, and AI-powered background noise suppression. Other in-demand features include distance learning and telemedicine.
The Qualcomm QCS8550 chip can also be used as a processor for the humanoid home robots presented at the trade fair. These robots combine the capabilities of Qualcomm's chatbots and robotics platforms. They can respond to voice commands, conduct conversations in natural language and use machine vision to distinguish objects, such as a water bottle from a soda can. The robots are designed to interact with people and other objects in real time and to perform tasks in challenging environments.