LG taught smart home to speak via Line messenger

Internet, technology, bioengineering ... all of these areas are increasingly tied to each other. The Internet of things is the real trend of recent years. Today, LG Electronics announced the HomeChat system, which will allow you to control smart home devices through the Line messenger.

More information is expected at CES 2014, which will be held January 7-10. So far, only some information about new products is known, but even it is quite worthy of attention.

Homechat

The presented system consists of 4 main components: refrigerator, washing machine, stove, vacuum cleaner.

• LG Smart Refrigerator allows you to look inside the refrigerator without opening the door. The refrigerator will send its contents to HomeChat in the form of a picture and may even tell you what to cook from the existing set of products.
  Freshness Tracker will show the shelf life of products.
• Smart Oven will tell recipes and help to implement them, reporting the readiness of the cake directly to the chat
• The washing machine may also indicate the end of the wash. In addition, you can ask the machine to update the washing program or load the tank.
• You can ask the SQUARE vacuum cleaner about when it was last cleaned, start it, or even set up a schedule

What additionally I want to note from myself:

• The system motivates to use . As you can see in the picture above, the devices make assumptions about how you would like to use them and offer to activate them.
• Talker interface . Chatbots still existed in IRC, however, modern messengers have already degenerated. Now they found a more useful application.
  “Users will not only be able to give commands like“ turn on ”or“ turn off ”, but in the literal sense of the word communicate with consumer electronics using ordinary human words and phrases. For example, it will be enough to say “I'm going on vacation”, and your “smart” refrigerator will go into energy-saving mode, and the robot vacuum cleaner will receive a task for regular cleaning of the room. In turn, these household appliances will notify you what is in the freezer and show the history of cleanings. ”

In addition, the system of NFC tags and “smart” diagnostics for the future series of LG smart devices has been announced, which will help owners avoid unnecessary visits to the repair shop.

At first, the service will be available only in English and Korean, and additional languages ​​will be introduced in 2014. The complexities of the multilingual implementation are understandable - despite the fact that so far the company implements NLP (Natural language processing) in limited areas, this is a rather difficult area.
“The future that we imagined from science fiction films and novels, when users communicate with things, turns out to be very close” - and in this case this is not a marketing bullshit. This is a working solution at an early stage of implementation.

Line

In this part, I will try to briefly explain why Line is a good choice as a platform for implementing HomeChat.
You may not have known, but:
Line is a contender for the most massive messaging service in the world. Slightly less than 300 million users in the world, of which more than 1.5 million people in Russia (comparable to the daily audience of Mail.ru Agent).
Line - has been successfully selling business accounts for a long time. The company already has chatbot functionality (albeit primitive ones), which means a lower implementation price.
Not the least role is played by the fact that Line has Korean roots and is controlled by South Korean Naver Corp. Like LG, which is also a South Korean company.

References:
If you missed the IoT concept (Internet for things), see here: rusbase.vc/news/internet-of-things LG
press release: www.lgnewsroom.com/newsroom/contents/64064
theRunet news, from which I twitched a couple of quotes : therunet.com/news/2273-vladeltsy-umnogo-doma-smogut-perepisyvatsya-s-nim-v-messendzhere