The Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the annual event for electronic device manufacturers, closes its doors on Friday January 12. Four days, the general public will have been bombarded with announcements or demonstrations of often boring, fanciful or useless gadgets. However, there are some intriguing products.
A motorized base that frames the image for you
Video calling sessions on smartphones would be more pleasant if we didn’t have to hold the mobile in our hand or prop it up in an improbable way. Reserved for iPhones, this motorized base could make these moments simpler, by directing the mobile vertically and horizontally automatically, so that its owner remains in the frame – even if it means following his movements 360°.
This base can also immortalize moments spent with our loved ones without having to disappear behind the mobile to film. It is he who frames, or rather the iPhone to which he is connected, and which controls its movements.
It remains to be seen how the pro rotating stand Belkin reacts when more than two people enter his field: which one does he follow? Does he often make bad choices? This base incorporates a battery so that it can be taken to any room. We regret that its price is dissuasive: 180 dollars, or around 165 euros.
A Windows PC integrating an Android tablet
Large tablets and small laptops share so many parts in common that they would benefit from merging: consumers would only have one device to buy, reducing their expenses and their carbon footprint. Unfortunately, attempts by manufacturers in this direction, led by Microsoft, have never entirely convinced: computers make passable tablets, and vice versa.
While waiting for Apple (which for the moment has no intention of doing so) to venture with its software and hardware resources to design such a hybrid machine, Lenovo’s somewhat convoluted idea of creating a machine integrating both good software for tablets, Android, and good software for computers, Windows, even if it means making expensive technical choices.
Under its keyboard, the Thinkbook Plus Hybrid houses the electronics of a PC, but in its detachable screen, it integrates that of the tablet: processor, battery and memory are duplicates. In the end, only the screen is truly shared, pushing the price ($2,000, or around 1,820 euros) to unreasonable heights.
One touch AI for Windows
Microsoft is moving full steam ahead towards a future where artificial intelligence (AI) assists us on a daily basis, a vision whose contours remain vague and whose first manifestation, the conversational robot hosted by the Bing search engine, attracts only slowly THE General public. No matter: a new key will soon appear on Microsoft laptops, triggering the “copilot”, an assistant powered by artificial intelligence. PC manufacturers like Asus And Acer have announced the integration of this button in certain ranges, even if for the moment, the Windows copilot is not yet available in France.
Sound glasses that enhance dialogue
In a noisy environment, these glasses are designed to increase the volume of the words of the person speaking to us. According to their creator, the Pulse Frames manage to locate the latter by analyzing the movements of our head thanks to a gyroscope.
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They capture sounds with a microphone and apply audio processing using artificial intelligence which weakens background noise. The dialogues “cleaned” are then rebroadcast into the ears using small speakers. This French product designed in partnership with the National Institute for Research in Digital Sciences and Technologies is still at the prototype stage. A connected speaker with a transparent screen.
An AI-powered assistant
This is one of Silicon Valley’s great current fantasies: a device entirely designed around AI that would support or replace our smartphones. Several start-ups are working there, including Humane, which will soon market the AI Pin, as well as a company shrouded in mystery, carried according to the Bloomberg agency by two figures from the valley, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and the former head of design at Apple, Jony Ive.
Rabbit is a third: it unveiled at CES a device half the size of a smartphone and driven by speechin natural language.
According to the Californian company, the R1 navigates for us through the menus of services like Uber, Spotify or Pizza Hut to satisfy our requests, more efficiently than the Siri or Alexa assistants. During the presentation of the R1, its creator asked him to imagine a precise vacation program based on fuzzy indications, with the AI then taking care of plane, hotel and rental car reservations. The R1 would further be able to use its camera to analyze images and answer questions about them. The device costs 200 dollars (around 185 euros).
Rabbit R1, Humane AI Pin, etc. : will one of these devices succeed in demonstrating its usefulness to the point of justifying that we give it, alongside our smartphones which in theory are or will soon be capable of such exploits too, a place in our pockets ? In any case, the R1 was one of the products most covered by the specialized press.