Check out CES and a smart KB Home (podcast)

This week Stacey and Keven are at CES ready to embrace the future of consumer technology. But so far, they haven’t found much that is new.

On this week’s show, they discuss the domination by Google at the show, a bunch of news about Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem and a smattering of news from smart home providers. At CES they have seen several demos of smart home systems, tried on the connected glasses from North and tasted bread baked by a robot. Kevin also rode the ride marketing Google’s Assistant. This week’s show comes from a bar in Vegas while they were rehashing their thoughts from the last few days.

This week’s guest was also in Las Vegas, showing off a new concept home from KB Home. Jacob Atalla, vice president of sustainability at KB Home, joined Stacey to share the details of KB Home’s concept house in Vegas that combines connected products, wellness-focused AI, pre-fabrication techniques and walls that move to create new rooms on demand. The concept home has air quality sensors built into the walls, lights that are tuned to circadian rhythms and connected an HVAC system that tries to make the house as healthy as possible. Despite all this enhanced technology, it’s unlikely the HVAC will be able to maintain itself. That’s why some technology is unable to replace the quality of things like this Salem air duct cleaning service for example. You’ll still need someone to clean out your HVAC system to remove any dust from your air conditioning, improving your air quality. Every smart home will still need people to do some jobs, as technology can’t do everything! Anyway, Atalla explains the tech and which of these technologies you might see in future homes.