The best smart home gadgets of CES 2017 – The Verge

Willow’s wireless pump may be a new mom’s breast friend

2017-01-06T13:15:54-05:00

Standing in the middle of a show floor at CES, a woman was explaining to me the pains of being a new mother. Every few hours, you're faced with a loud, noise machine going at your breasts for milk, which require your full attention and both hands to hold everything in place. She's not talking about the baby itself. Nope - she's talking about a traditional breast pump machine.

The Willow smart breast pump system is designed to alleviate that pain by being hands-free, tubeless, and relatively un-noisy. It was difficult to test the latter factor in a large event space, but the Willow device did look less intimidating than the average pump. The …

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The relentless persistence of the hideous spider router

2017-01-05T17:03:44-05:00

The wireless router has earned a bit of a reputation in recent years as a playground. It's where certain tech companies, those typically with outlandish ideas and poor taste, experiment with just how gaudy and ridiculous they can make the simple act of handling internet traffic over a home network. These monstrosities tend to manifest as multi-arm, arachnid-like beasts that feel more at home in a deep sea fishing slideshow than anywhere remotely close to your computer setup.

Case in point: Asus' new gaming-focused Rapture, shown off at CES yesterday. Set aside for a moment the audacity to conflate a router with the second coming of Christ, …

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FridgeCam spies on your fridge and tells you what to cook

2017-01-05T12:55:28-05:00

Your fridge is old and boring. Maybe it came with your apartment, or maybe you inherited it from a Craigslist rando, but one thing is certain: you're a tech person. You deserve a smart fridge. The FridgeCam, which is a literal camera designed to sit in your fridge, will make your old fridge smart.

The camera employs custom food recognition software that can reportedly track what's in your fridge, suggest recipes, and save you from wasting food. You just have to scan the food's barcode on the FridgeCam's app, which connects over Wi-Fi, whenever you put something inside. The fridge then will either already know how long that food item can las …

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Baidu’s ‘Little Fish’ home robot could be China’s Echo

2017-01-05T12:10:07-05:00

While Amazon and Google are battling for voice assistant dominance in the home, they've mostly neglected other countries. Now Baidu, in partnership with AiNemo, is building the Xiaoyu Zaijia ("Little Fish") family robot, which, on paper, has most of Alexa's talents along with a big screen, a camera, and a touch of robotics. If you couldn't guess, it's for China.

The robot responds to the "xiaoyu xiaoyu" wake word, and turns its head to look at whoever is talking. I don't speak Chinese, so I couldn't talk to it beyond waking it up, but the voice commands were consistently working for the Chinese PR people who were showing me the robot, even …

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Thermomix is the $1,299 ‘digital kitchen’ for that tiny house you’ll never own

2017-01-05T01:40:36-05:00

The gadget world is full of companies that don't so much sell a labor-saving product as they do a fantasy of organization and efficiency. Vorwerk, maker of the Thermomix, is one such company. Thermomix is technically a food processor. But it's really meant to be an all-in-one kitchen, complete with recipe book - cooking entire meals in the space of a couple cubic feet. This is not something I will ever need. But I would probably feel really clever if I learned to use it.

The fully assembled Thermomix is a tower of pots and cooking peripherals. Its base is large, white, and rounded - not something from an industrial kitchen, but a soft-focus …

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Simplehuman’s new trash cans have voice commands and Wi-Fi

2017-01-04T22:39:15-05:00

Simplehuman is a company known for high-end home goods, including its deluxe trash cans (yes, those are a thing). And at CES 2017, the company showed off its most technological garbage bin yet: a voice-activated trash can that can open and close through verbal commands.

The initial version of the voice-activated garbage can will be available in two capacities: a smaller $180 garbage-only version, and a more expensive but larger $240 model that has both trash and recycling receptacles. The cans open up to requests of "Open can" or "Open sesame," and can be verbally instructed to close or stay open as well. Both cans also offer a motion sen …

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Look at this creepy-cute little baby monitor with bunny ears

2017-01-04T21:00:02-05:00

Netgear has been filling out its line of Arlo home security cameras over the past few months, and today it's introducing what is unquestionably the best one yet: a baby monitor with bunny ears. Or cat ears. Or a little Dalmatian outfit.

It's called the Arlo Baby, and it's basically just a fancier version of the existing Arlo security cameras that's been reworked a little to do a better job of watching a baby than watching your yard for weirdos. Also, it has ears.

To make the camera a little bit friendlier, it'll come with green bunny ears and feet that snap onto the camera. They can be removed altogether or swapped for alternate costumes ( …

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The Leka smart toy is a robot for children with developmental disabilities

2017-01-04T18:42:04-05:00

One of the biggest and most biting criticism of modern tech is the industry's excessive push to solve trivial problems. Nowhere is this theme more apparent than among the sea of forgettable gadgets at CES, itself a trade show that revels in the opulence of Las Vegas and the often hollow promise of our techno-enabled future. Occasionally, there is a device that breaks the mold. Leka, a smart toy from a French startup of the same name, is a tiny spherical robot not unlike Star Wars' BB-8. Instead of dazzling us with cheap tricks, Leka has a purpose: to help children with autism and other developmental disabilities better learn and communicate …

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This smart cat feeder lets your pet remove the last vestige of human interaction

2017-01-04T13:20:03-05:00

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In the age of the ubiquitous smartphone, it's only a matter of time before every object - no matter how trivial or trite - gets connected to the internet. That brings us to Catspad, an automated smart cat feeder that allows a feline friend to eat dry food and drink clean water for up to one month without any direct physical intervention from a human owner. The device, from a French startup of the same name, is going live on Kickstarter later this week, and we got an early glimpse of a prototype here at CES this evening.

Catspad can even identify your cat and dispense food based on its microchip

By connecting to Wi-Fi via the Catspad mobile a …

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The HiMirror Plus scanned my face and told me I have wrinkles

2017-01-04T11:59:47-05:00

The HiMirror Plus is a new smart mirror that'll scan your face and tell you what's wrong with it. It looks for wrinkles, red spots, pores, fine lines, and brightness levels. The mirror's a harsh critic, yes, but the idea is that you'll track your skin as you change beauty products, so you'll know what's working and what's not. Also, you can watch yourself slowly age! That's fun. The mirror rates each part of your skin on a scale of 100 with 100 representing skin perfection

I tried out the new HiMirror Plus, which is the second version of this device, at CES this week. My skin is generally good. I don't break out much and on the whole I don' …

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