Last week, and for the third year in a row, we exhibited our connected living solutions at CES, in Las Vegas. The International Consumer Electronic Show (CES) is the biggest technology tradeshow of this kind in the world, and we feel very proud of having taken part in an exhibition that brings together some of the most prominent companies in the industry.
Our main message this year was to show service providers across all many verticals how they can use our platforms to grow their business by utilizing smart home technologies to offer new services to their customers and expand their customer reach.
Traditionally, and since it takes place so early in the year, CES offers a sneak peek of everything that is to come during the next twelve months, setting the industry trends and tone for the present year. And if one thing became clear on this year’s edition is that the future of connected living technologies is tied to voice control –and apparently, we are just scratching the surface. It has become obvious over the past few years that voice activation has already become the main driver of the industry and is clearly here to stay. Juniper Research expects more than half of the US households to have at least one of these smart speakers by 2022. However, if last year Amazon’s Alexa already stole all the looks, on this occasion it had to share the spotlight with Google Assistant, which has grown dramatically over the last year, since it opened up to third-party integrations on December 2016.
In fact, voice integration with Google Assistant has been the latest innovation introduced to our WeR@Home solution, a fully integrated system to remotely manage security, safety and smart home devices. We presented this development at CES by setting up a demo room in Israel that could be remotely managed from our CES booth in Las Vegas, just by using ‘Hey, Google!’ voice commands as you can see in the video.
Google Assistant’s integration with WeR@Home comes to complement the already voice-activated Care@Home, our monitoring platform for seniors who wish to stay independent and age safely at home. Care@Home’s award-winning Voice Panic Detector (VPD) enables seniors to ask for help and receive emergency attention even in situations where they are unable to activate a panic button, adding an additional safety layer to traditional PERS.
Now we are proud to say that both our smart living and smart care solutions for service providers —security, insurance, utilities, telcos, and healthcare— incorporate voice control features. This innovation will help increase consumer convenience, security and peace of mind while enhancing customer loyalty and profitability for service providers.
Our Head of Marketing, Rafi Zauer came back with these impressions “This was our largest presence at CES thus far, both in terms of booth space and team members. We are so happy to have gotten our message across that connected living tech is not just about the gadgetry, it is a huge growth engine for service providers of all types.
Aside from voice, what we all saw there this year in terms of progression in AI technologies across the board – like autonomous cars and robotics were standouts at this year’s edition and prove that 2018 is going to be an exciting year for technology”
Thanks to all the visitors to our stand and to our amazing team in Las Vegas. We really hope to see you all next year. Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe to our blog so you never miss an update!
“Coming out of CES, we’re going to clearly have established that voice is going to be the go-to user interface. Wherever we go or whatever we’re doing, we’re going to have some form of digital assistant at our side ready to help us.” —Steve Koenig, senior director of market research for the Consumer Technology Association.
