LG has announced the Hub Robot, a worthy competitor to Amazon’s Echo and Google Home. Just like the other home robots, it’ll start playing your music upon command, tell you the weather and answer any other questions you want to ask the internet.
“It can pre-heat your oven,” David VanderWaal, vice-president of marketing, home appliances & consumer at LG said. “It’ll initiate your robot vacuum cleaner when you leave the house,” he added.
Another of its talents is turning on your washing machine if you’re not at home, so you’ll return to beautiful smelling washing rather than damp clothes that have been sitting in the machine all day.
The benefit of this is LG Hub also uses machine learning, so it’ll work out when you want your appliances to be switched on based on your daily routine. It won’t just switch your washing machine on if there’s nothing in it, of course.
However, you’ll obviously need to own the smart appliances before you can use the LG Hub Robot, otherwise it’s much the same as cheaper devices from Amazon and Google, for example, that may not be able to control your entire home, but still do the basics.
LG’s director of PR Taryn Brucia did tell the Guardian that LG Hub is trying to compete directly with products already on the market though. But, it’ll willing to let the rivalry go in order to improve the product in future.
“We are working with our partners to see how we might synchronize to work with each other,” she said.
LG Hub Robot isn’t just intelligent, it’s a pretty good looker too, with a round face and squat body. It’ll even dance along in time with any music you trigger, adding to its cutesy image.
The robot will go on sale later this year, although LG hasn’t yet revealed its price.
