The Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the annual event for electronic device manufacturers, closes its doors on Friday, January 12. For 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 orienting the mobile vertically and horizontally automatically, so that its owner remains in the frame – even if it means following its 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 his movements.
It remains to be seen how Belkin’s pro rotating stand reacts when more than two people enter its field: which one does it 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 costs 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 dollars, 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, is only slowly gaining traction. 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 key into certain ranges, even if for the moment, 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 Frame manages to locate the latter by analyzing the movements of our head using a gyroscope.
They capture sounds with a microphone and apply audio processing using artificial intelligence which weakens background noise. The “cleaned” dialogue is then played back into the ears through 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
It’s 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, supported according to the Bloomberg agency by two figures from the valley, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, and former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
Rabbit is a third: it unveiled at CES a device half the size of a smartphone and controlled by speech, in 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 it to imagine a precise vacation program on the basis of fuzzy indications, 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.