How LG Electronics brought the battle of “smarts” versus “intelligence” to CES 2018

Entertainment and home appliance technologies incorporating AI technology can get “smarter” with time, essentially “upgrading themselves”. Like fine wine, user experience with the new technology gets better with time.

When the Kenyan government finally put its foot down on the digital migration back-and-forth in 2015, a different, less overt but related battle was simmering in conversations at home, the office and social media.

It turned out that many Kenyans had no clue what the word “digital” meant when it came to TV signals. This was reflected in the mad rush to buy terrestrial digital TV boxes. The Communications Authority did an excellent job in educating the public on the differences between analogue and digital TV signals, along with the advantages of the latter.

Smart but not digital?

With time, consumers discovered that you could buy a TV that had an internal digital receiver, thus removing the need for an external receiver. However, a major point of confusion emerged when some users realised they had Smart TVs that could not receive digital channels. Huh?

The confusion was telling, because most people just assumed that a Smart TV had the latest technology and should therefore have a digital receiver. It turns out that there was still a lot to learn about the technology that is so central to our home entertainment.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

This year, Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the common refrain at the recently concluded Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Technology manufacturers such as LG Electronics arrested crowds at their booths with  their new AI TVs that had Natural Language Processing (NLP) to deliver intelligent voice-activated control and connectivity based on LG’s own deep learning technology, DeepThinQ.

LG East Africa’s head of Marketing, Moses Marji, argues that AI is no longer a frontier in electronics innovation. The frontier lies in how seamlessly manufacturers can make AI integration to user’s day-to-day activities.

“Electronics manufacturers are learning to take advantage of each other’s strength to develop products that would otherwise be impossible to deliver when done alone. This is what made possible for LG to incorporate AI technology in traditionally ‘dumb’ devices such as the new InstaView ThinQ refrigerator and the EasyClean^® oven range among others,” says Mr Marji.

The inevitable question then becomes, what is the difference between, say, a Smart TV and an “artificially” intelligent one? Also, is smart better than intelligent or vice versa?

Smart but not intelligent?

Traditionally, Smart TVs were simply TVs that had the capability to connect to the internet and had modifiable internal storage in which web applications could be installed and downloaded files stored. Consumers often bought Smart TVs for the convenience of accessing movie streaming services and minimal web browsing on a screen bigger than a laptop.

However, while these initial TVs were Smart, they were not intelligent. Artificial Intelligence essentially means the ability of a machine to learn and become smarter. This means that entertainment and home appliance technologies incorporating AI technology can get “smarter” with time, essentially “upgrading themselves”. Like fine wine, user experience with the new technology gets better with time.

Beyond the internet-of-things

AI makes its host appliance not only user-friendly, but also intuitive as the ability to learn with usage means the appliance requires less programming and repetition of common instructions.

This battle of Smarts versus Intelligence will definitely be a recurrent pattern in many booths in future CESs. With the Internet of Things now becoming almost superfluous, the world is waiting to see the next wave of this intelligence evolution.