LG taught smart home to talk through the instant messenger Line

Internet, technology, bioengineering ... all these areas are increasingly tied to each other. The Internet of Things is a real trend of recent years. Today, LG Electronics has announced a system of HomeChat, which will allow you to control smart home devices through the Line messenger.

More information is expected at CES 2014, which will be held January 7-10. So far, only some information about new products is known, but even it deserves attention.

HomeChat

The presented system consists of 4 main components: refrigerator, washing machine, stove, vacuum cleaner.

• LG Smart Refrigerator allows you to look inside the refrigerator without opening the door. The refrigerator will send its contents to HomeChat in the form of a picture and can even suggest what to prepare from the existing set of products.
  Freshness Tracker will show the shelf life of products.
• Smart Oven will tell you recipes and help you implement them, telling you that the cake is ready right in the chat.
• The washing machine may also report the end of the wash. In addition, you can ask the machine to update the washing program or load the tank.
• You can ask the SQUARE vacuum cleaner when it was removed last time, run it, and maybe even set up a schedule.

What I additionally want to note from myself

• The system motivates to use . As you can see in the picture above, devices make assumptions about how you would like to use them and offer to activate them.
• The chat interface . Chat bots existed in the IRC, but in modern messengers have already degenerated. Now they found a more useful application.
  “Users will not only be able to give commands like“ turn on ”or“ turn off ”, but in the literal sense of the word, communicate with consumer electronics using ordinary human words and expressions. For example, it will be enough to say “I'm going on vacation”, and your “smart” refrigerator will go into energy-saving mode, and the robot cleaner will receive a task for regular cleaning of the room. In turn, these household appliances will notify you that they are in the freezer and show the history of cleaning. ”

In addition, the system announced NFC-tags and “smart” diagnostics for the future series of LG smart devices, which will help owners avoid unnecessary visits to the repair shop.

At first, the service will be available only in English and Korean, and additional languages ​​will be introduced in 2014. The difficulties of multilingual implementation are understandable - despite the fact that so far the company has been implementing NLP (Natural language processing) in limited areas, this is a rather difficult area.
“The future that we imagined from fantastic films and novels, when users communicate with things, turns out to be very close” - and in this case it is not a marketing bullshit. This is a working solution at an early stage of implementation.

LINE

In this part I will try to briefly explain why Line is a good choice as a platform for the implementation of HomeChat.
You might not have known, but:
Line - a contender for the most massive messenger service in the world. Slightly less than 300 million users in the world, of which more than 1.5 million people in Russia (comparable to the daily audience of Mail.ru Agent).
Line - has been successfully selling business accounts for a long time. The company already has a chatbots functionality (albeit primitive), which means lower implementation costs.
Last but not least, Line has Korean roots and is controlled by South Korean Naver Corp. Like LG, which is also a South Korean company.
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References:
If you missed the concept of IoT (Internet for things), see here: rusbase.vc/news/internet-of-things
LG press release: www.lgnewsroom.com/newsroom/contents/64064
The news of theRunet, from which I pulled a couple of quotes: therunet.com/news/2273-vladeltsy-umnogo-doma-smogut-perepisyvatsya-s-nim-v-messendzhere