Edge intelligence and interoperability are the key components driving the next chapter of the smart home

The smart home is evolving to include advanced capabilities, such as digital assistants that interact like friends and family, and refrigerators that monitor inventory, generate recipes and alert users when attention is needed. The primary objective remains to save time, reduce effort, and enhance security, health and enjoyment.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. is laser-focused on driving this evolution, with significant advancements anticipated in the smart home and life industry. This transformation is underpinned by generative AI and edge AI, utilizing Qualcomm Technologies' expertise in developing power-efficient, high-performance chips with cutting-edge connectivity technologies.

Generative AI has introduced a myriad of possibilities across industries, with the smart home industry being particularly promising. As AI becomes more prevalent and integrated into devices, the vision of seamless human-to-machine communication is becoming a reality. Edge AI enables more processing to occur on the device itself, resulting in faster, more secure and highly personalized experiences.

As a leader in smart home innovation, Qualcomm Technologies is continually looking ahead to future advancements. We are excited to introduce new internet of things (IoT) solutions frameworks aimed at enhancing the development of smart home and life products. These frameworks, part of the Qualcomm IoT Solutions Framework, are designed to create, deploy and scale AI-rich IoT applications efficiently, emphasizing our commitment to driving intelligence everywhere with wireless connectivity, high-performance, low-power computing and on-device AI.

The new solutions include:

• AI chatbot for Home Appliances
• Interactive Multimedia AI Optimization
• Home Service Robot

All three solutions will be showcased at the Qualcomm booth at CES 2025.

Smart home devices are poised for a big upgrade

We consider 2025 as the dawn of a new era in smart home evolution, where devices will run on high-powered processors capable of handling complex AI tasks independently, going a step further than simply being connected to a home network.

A key feature of these devices, whether it be a refrigerator, smart television or humanoid robot, will be their ability to communicate with users. We have developed an AI chatbot that can engage in real-time interactive conversations, with responses generated through a large language model.

Unlike the commonly used smart speakers in current smart homes, this chatbot can be integrated into a wide variety of smart home devices. This will be demonstrated at CES through a proof-of-concept developed in collaboration with Thundercomm. The chatbot and its capabilities utilize the QCS8550 platform, a single-SOC solution that offers on-device AI computation, along with camera and multimedia capabilities.

With this iteration of the chatbot, users can ask their refrigerator to recommend recipes based on the available ingredients detected through computer vision. It can also create a shopping list for additional ingredients, order them from a nearby store, and alert a family member's car to pick them up on the way home. This is just one example of how AI chatbots with conversational UI enable home appliances to provide true service.

The flexibility of this solution means the chatbot can follow users throughout the home via multiple smart devices.

Big screen, big features

One device ripe for innovation is the television in your homeroom. Expect smarter TVs powered by Qualcomm Technologies’ Interactive Multimedia solution to tap into new capabilities that enable fresh experiences for consumers and new service opportunities for the media and telecom industry. 

This solution utilizes input from video cameras and microphones to perform computer vision and speech-to-text AI, allowing users to better control their TV and connected smart home devices with natural language, whether it’s changing channels, adjusting settings for a smart TV app, or controlling other smart home devices.

These AI capabilities will enable new user experiences such as spur-of-the-moment watch parties with friends, real-time language translation between non-native speaking relatives, personalized movie recommendations based on users' emotional states, and generating travel plans for your family. The TVs will utilize our chipsets like the QCS8550 to access large language model-based voice recognition, multi-modal LLM inputs, computer vision models to identify objects, people, gestures and faces, and even AI-based background noise suppression.

Looking beyond, there are many potential applications in the educational field with remote tutoring or healthcare and telemedicine that a television armed with a camera and sensors can enable. 

Television makers, set-top box makers and cable TV providers are seeking new ways to add value beyond delivering content, and we’re helping to create these opportunities.

A companion and concierge

At Qualcomm Technologies, we are always looking ahead, and the rise of generative AI is paving the way for the prospect of a companion robot in smart homes. At CES, we will be showcasing a Home Service Robot developed in collaboration with AI solution developer APLUX and Ti5 Robot.

This robot represents the culmination of our efforts in smart homes, integrating the AI chatbot with our robotics platforms. It can respond to voice commands and engage in natural language conversations. The built-in cameras enable machine vision and image recognition, allowing the robot to distinguish between a bottle of water and a soda can when prompted verbally.

For instance, the Qualcomm QCS8550 processor empowers the humanoid robot we are showcasing at CES with superior computing, sensing, decision-making and execution capabilities. The enhanced versatility and ubiquity of the robot enables it to interact in real-time and perform tasks efficiently and reliably in various complex environments.

This is just the beginning. The work we’re doing now is opening the doors to big changes in your home, whether it’s chatbots all around you, smarter televisions, or a robot assistant preparing your meals.