E-Commerce Trends: LG Home Chat: Why will you ever Chat with your Appliances?!

By Raymond Garcia, Kristine Go, David Pe, Keanu Yu

One of the leading brands of smart appliances and technological advances is LG Electronics. The company designs products that are intuitive, responsive, and energy efficient to be more productive and to create a better world ─ from TVs and innovative appliances to mobile phones and computer accessories. This year they introduced LG HomeChat, a modern and exciting way to communicate and monitor appliances smoothly.

LG HomeChat

With the new LG HomeChat, the concept of connected home is made possible. It combines Natural Language Processing (NPL) and the mobile messenger phenomenon LINE with convenient smartphone accessibility. This means that users could issue commands and receive status updates from their smart appliances. Through simple, conversational texting, one could check refrigerator contents, download tons of recipes, turn on the washer and update cycles, and command the robot vacuum to clean the house; the smart appliances would respond just as a person would even if one is thousand of miles away. The service is designed to suit LG products only, particularly major home appliances such as LG Smart Refrigerator, LG Washing Machine, LG Smart Oven, and LG SMart Vacuum.

The service requires the use of the LINE Messenger application in order to complete the functions. This is already available on Android, iOS, Windows and other smartphone platforms. Currently, LG is persistently finding a way on integrating the HomeChat with other various messenger services along with multiple other languages aside from English and Korean.

A Complete Food Management System

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Its Smart View feature, a built-in internal refrigerator camera, is placed on top of the main compartment which can show content from upper to bottom-most shelves. It also detects the opening and closing of the door and takes photos of the food items stored when last opened. One could keep track of the food inventory in the refrigerator by receiving a full status update from the appliance directly to the smartphone. Users of HomeChat could simply message their fridge of what’s available or not from a grocery store to know what items to pick up. Even beverage or food expiration dates as well as additional ingredients required based on a recipe could be identified using Smart Manager’s Freshness Tracker. For a more enjoyable and amusing feature, this new discovery allows family members and friends to upload photos from their smartphones to the LCD display panel of the fridge through LINE Messenger application.

A Washing Machine That Thinks for You

LG HomeChat allows users to remotely control and their LG smart washing machine when outside their home. Users could simply text “what are you doing?” to get a real-time update on the current washing cycle. During times when someone wishes to wash the clothes when they’re away, just text “start washing cycle” and the LG smart washing machine makes sure the clothes are done by the time that someone gets home. Whenever the washing cycle is done, HomeChat shall notify the owner about the status. It is designed to have a smart touch display that makes selection of wash cycles easy; appropriate wash cycles that shall suit every person’s needs can be downloadable via Wi-Fi connection.

Recipe Recommendations- Smart Oven

Through the HomeChat and Recipe Search, users could ask for recipe recommendations of any specific dishes or meal type. The oven will then automatically select the appropriate settings. One could even command the oven to start pre-heating before one even gets home. First, one shall select the Return-home button through HomeChat. In return, LG smart oven will reply “what dish would you like to make today?” and open the Recipe Search window. The oven temperature and cooking time will be set once the dish is ready to cook. Additionally, users will receive alerts on their smartphones whenever new recipes are available.

Much More Than a Vacuum

By texting a Hom-Bot Square which is LG’s robotic vacuum cleaner, users could program a vacuuming regimen for specific areas of the house using special cleaning patterns. One could even ask Hom-Bot Square “when did you last clean?” and via HomeChat, it respond something like “10:50 started cleaning with zigzag mode; 11:30 finished cleaning with zigzag mode.”

Importance

The importance of this new technology and application is basically to make lives for us humans easier. It’s useful since we encounter these appliances in our everyday routines and to be honest, it is time-consuming. Majority of the working class are already bombarded with work and manually doing all of these processes somewhat takes up energy that could be used for other purposes. Being able to come up with this type of technology, LG just took innovation to another level and set the standards for future home appliances.