Tree species It’s CES week. Yes, it’s time to dive back into that glitzy, chaotic showcase where thousands of startups, companies, and general technology weirdos gather to show off all the new tech and futuristic devices that will give us a glimpse of the year in tech to come. AI is in everything, we’re getting ChatGPT in our flying cars, and TVs are getting so big and bright you need sunglasses to watch them.
This week on Gadget Lab, we come to you straight from lovely Las Vegas, Nevada, where CES is in full swing. We huddled together in a Vegas hotel room to talk all about the big trends, crazy tech, and just plain weird stuff we saw this week
Show Notes
Follow CES on our liveblog and check out the many, many bizarre and wonderful things we saw at CES this year. Read Jeremy’s look at the Supernal flying car. Read Julian’s story about the Rabbit R1 AI personal assistant device. Check out wehead.com, if you dare. Follow all of WIRED’s CES coverage now and forever.
Adrienne So can be found on social media @adriennemso. Julian Chokkattu is @JulianChokkattu. Jeremy is @jeremywired. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.
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Transcript
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]
Michael Calore: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I am Michael Calore, I’m a senior editor at WIRED. Lauren is not around this week, and in fact, I’m not around this week either. We have slipped out of our cozy studio in the San Francisco office and we are here in The Wilds, in the high desert of Las Vegas, Nevada, to cover the cavalcade of gadgets that is CES 2024.
I’m in this very posh and cozy hotel room with three of my colleagues, so we apologize. The audio is not going to be entirely professional, but we are doing our best, people. I tell you, we’re doing our best. I have here with me, to my right, the awesome WIRED senior editor Jeremy White.
Jeremy White: Hello.
Michael Calore: Hello. Sitting across from me is WIRED senior reviews editor Julian Chokkattu.
Julian Chokkattu: Hello.
Michael Calore: Hello, Julian. Over here to my left, but not least, WIRED senior associate reviews editor Adrienne So.
Adrienne So: Hi.
Michael Calore: Hi, Adrienne. All right, everybody. How’s everybody doing? Having a good show?
Jeremy White: I’m just about surviving, to be honest with you.
Adrienne So: I am having a great time, and it just keeps getting better.
Julian Chokkattu: Today was a peak.
Adrienne So: Yes, yeah.
Julian Chokkattu: It was a peak. It was good.
Adrienne So: We really did. We really did it today, Julian. We nailed CES.
Michael Calore: Most people listening to the show know what CES is. Julian, can you give us a quick primer, for anybody who may not know what the hell we’re talking about, when we say words, those three letters?
Julian Chokkattu: Sure. Yeah. CES is the Consumer Electronics Show. It’s been around for more than a hundred years, I believe. Yeah, it’s that long. It’s the place where everyone goes to see all the latest technology that comes out from all over the world. It’s gadgets from TVs to speakers to cars and all sorts of things. It sets the tone for the rest of the year, in terms of what you can expect to see from the tech world and how companies are looking at things and what you can expect, the types of products you can expect to see coming out to market for the rest of 2024.
Michael Calore: Nice. That was a very good and succinct CES primer.
Julian Chokkattu: Thanks. Work for CTA or something.
Adrienne So: It’s also the one place in time where 90 percent of the people have Androids instead of iPhones.
Julian Chokkattu: This is probably true in some way. Yeah, I saw a lot of Pixels.
Michael Calore: You saw some Pixel Folds in The Wild?
Jeremy White: I saw a lot. I saw a couple of Pixel Folds, yeah, so very unusual. They definitely did not work for Google. It did not look like they worked for Google, so I did make sure.
Michael Calore: Nice. One of the things that we were expecting coming into this week, was that the hype about AI that we’ve seen overtake the consumer tech industry in the last year would be here full force, because people have had a year to prepare, to put AI into all their products. We were expecting to see a lot of products with AI in them. I think the consumer technology industry delivered on that promise.
Jeremy White: Hell, yeah. It reminded me of when digital assistants first came out, really, and we had that glorious year of when they shoved digital assistants into absolutely everything. You had the microwave. You had absolutely, you have kettles. You had walk-around robots and it was in absolutely everything. It reminds me of that. The CEO’s going, “Oh my God, we’ve got another version of this, a pimped version of that. Let’s put it in everything and then work out what on earth to do with it later.”
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Adrienne So: I did encounter one moment of what I thought was going to be common sense, when I was speaking to one CEO who said, “Good quality in is good quality out, and that’s why we don’t have suggestive AI in our product.” Then a moment later she said, “So it will be coming up in the next month or the next year or so,” and I was like, “OK,” so we’re being restrained right now.
Michael Calore: Right, because if you don’t put AI in your thing, then somebody’s going to come along and make a version of your thing with AI in it, and then you’re going to be out on the curb.
Adrienne So: Yeah, for real.
Michael Calore: Mm-hmm.
Julian Chokkattu: Yeah. I weirdly feel like the companies I saw that were not really talking about the generative AI part of it were the more interesting ones that actually had a use case for that application that made sense, versus a lot of the other companies that were like AI and then you’d ask them, “What does it do?” They’re like stuff. Yeah, cool. That was just generally a lot of AI and everything. Then you definitely have to try and parse out exactly what it is the AI is doing. Turns out 75 percent of the time, not much.
Michael Calore: Right.
Julian Chokkattu: Or nothing interesting really, or helpful to the nature of the product.
Michael Calore: Right.
Julian Chokkattu: Yeah.
Michael Calore: There’s a lot of things with ChatGPT capability in it this year.
Julian Chokkattu: Yes.
Jeremy White: It wasn’t just that though, as well. You had things like a smart bird feeder that used AI to recognize over 10,000 species of birds.
Michael Calore: I want that.
Jeremy White: It wasn’t just … It was in everything.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Jeremy White: Even the bird feeder made more sense than a lot of the other, much more expensive products you come across. At least they had something to do with it. “Oh, we’re going to identify birds.” Yes. OK, that’s a use case that has value, but a lot of the times as Julian said, you go, “What on earth are you doing with that?”
Adrienne So: Yeah.
Jeremy White: But yeah, ChatGPT, absolutely.
Adrienne So: Yeah. The use case that I saw on my beat a lot was AI stain detection for floors and robot vacuums. Every time I saw it, I had to refrain. I had to physically hold my face back from saying that iRobot has had dirt detect since 2004. Do we need AI for all the things that AI is doing? I am not really sure.
Julian Chokkattu: I mean, AI, this has been a thing though for at least five to six years, where AI is just a substitute for smart. It’s a smart gadget and AI just doesn’t really mean anything in this context. Even what you said, dirt detect, that’s a smart application, but there’s no way of AI actually doing anything in that.
Adrienne So: Yeah. It’s not continually improving upon itself.
Julian Chokkattu: Right.
Adrienne So: In the process of finding more and sophisticated kinds of dirt in your home. The flagship product in one of my beats was the ChatGPT-enabled electric bike, which I was prepared to find as a load of complete hooey, but I actually ended up liking quite a bit.
Michael Calore: What about ChatGPT and a bike makes it good?
Adrienne So: OK, so what this bike is the CEO told me, “Don’t think of it as a bike. Think of it as a very large phone that you ride on,” which is just priceless. But you can ask it, it didn’t start off promising, I asked it to find me coffee and it told me I could use a French press. That was not a good start, but afterwards I finally figured out the use case and then I asked it to help me take a ride around Vegas, help me sight-see on a two-hour bike ride around Vegas, and it would just help me point out a route. It was going to navigate and you can add points of interest and that kind of thing. That’s the use case where I finally had to concede like, “OK, maybe my bike can be my friend.”
Julian Chokkattu: I mean, to an extent I feel like that functionality will at some point just be your phone and it doesn’t need to be in the bike.
Adrienne So: But what if your phone was your bike?
Julian Chokkattu: The bike.
Jeremy White: You could ride on it.
Adrienne So: What? What if you could check your bike while you’re watching TV? All right. I don’t know where.
Michael Calore: Well, Jeremy, you cover the automotive industry for us, and you’ve been covering it for a long time, and I’m sure you’ve had a lot of experience playing with all the different voice assistants in the cars that have been coming out over the last 10 years. Now that people are putting ChatGPT into cars, is it getting any better?
Jeremy White: Well, it can’t get any worse. This is the situation we’re in. You are right. I mean, a number of car manufacturers announced some version, some sort of LLM, large language model in their vehicles. VW has actually gotten ChatGPT into their cars now. Now, what this actually means really is some sort of pimped version of a voice assistant, and that’s the examples they gave it. On stage they said, “OK, well you want to go somewhere?” OK, before you would ask, say, “I’m hungry, show me restaurants,” or “Take me to restaurants.” It was sort of possible, with a following wind, it would be able to do that for you.
Now you can have a slightly more complicated query like, “I’m hungry for butter chicken,” and then it knows what you’re talking about. Then it can take you to curry restaurants nearby and things like that.
Michael Calore: Right.
Jeremy White: That’s the difference. I mean, it’s not much more than that. They want it to be slightly conversational, but it’s only just a little bit more so. When you talk to them about whether this is going to transform how we live with our cars and be in our cars, they don’t really have any solid answers on whether it will or not.
Michael Calore: Well, while we’re on the topic of cars, can we talk about flying cars?
Jeremy White: My favorite topic.
Michael Calore: This is not a topic that is new to you as somebody who covers CES every year.
Jeremy White: Oh, now. That’s the thing, I’ve been knocking, I’ve been doing down flying cars all my career, really. Here I am at CES and the thing I’ve written most about is a flying car.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Jeremy White: It makes me very sad, but this is the thing, there’s about three or four flying car companies here showing their wares and they’re, “Oh, this is the thing.” Now it’s coming out, but the big one is actually a company called Supernal, which is an offshoot of the Hyundai Motor Group.
Hyundai Motor Group have Genesis, the EV brand, Genesis, they have Kia, they have the Hyundai of course, and they’ve got Supernal. Supernal is their air cab, their taxi, electric VTOL, so eVTOL, so vertical takeoff and landing. They’ve finally announced their proper concept. This is what’s going to be made apparently and in the skies in four years time.
Michael Calore: Nice. These are not quadcopters, right? They’re not just big drones.
Jeremy White: They’re not big drones. It’s not just getting in like e-hang where you just get in and it’s automated and it takes you somewhere. It’s piloted, so human pilot and then space for four passengers. But you can take out the seats and have no passengers or just two passengers. You can figure out how you like, but it flies up to 20 to 25 minutes, or 25 miles, 25 to 40 miles. It’s short journeys, and it flies at 120 miles an hour at 1,500 feet.
Michael Calore: I want one.
Jeremy White: They say it’s going to be affordable, but it just looks like something for rich people. It really does. Instead of helicopters, this is how rich people will get to and from airports or to their office blocks or their penthouses or whatever it is.
Michael Calore: The yachts.
Jeremy White: Exactly, exactly. But the design is something else. I mean, all of the rotors tilt up and down, and they don’t all tilt in the same direction. When it’s vertically taking off, they don’t all tilt upwards. The back ones tilt down, the front ones tilt up to stop the sheer forces in the fuselage. It’s incredibly quiet. It’s as quiet as, they say, I can’t quite believe this is true, but they say it’s as quiet as a dishwasher.
Michael Calore: They have not met my dishwasher.
Adrienne So OK. I am going to say it may be for rich people, but if I could pay $50 once every six months to make my flight and get taken to the airport in a flying car, I would definitely do that, and I would probably make a TikTok about it. It would be awesome. I can’t wait.
Jeremy White: It does look awesome. It’s a lovely design, and it’s got this hexagonal glass bulb at the front of it, so you can almost see all the way around to the ground, so you can see what you’re … The coming down, pilot can see and that whole front shape here, this hexagonal glass was apparently designed on the shape of a bee’s head. It was like biomimicry. What does a bee’s head look like and what would a bee’s head look like if it was going really fast?
Adrienne So: When I think of superb flyers, I think bees.
Jeremy White: Bees, I know, what on earth were they thinking? But it’s one of those few occasions where this sort of thing is always just around the corner. But they actually made me think, and I could very much live to regret this, they actually made me think that, “Yeah, they are going to do this.”
Michael Calore: All right, well we only have to wait a few years to find out.
Jeremy White: Four.
Michael Calore: Four years to find out. OK, let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back.
[Break]
Michael Calore: OK, Julian, we have to talk about televisions, because CES is always a big television show. Everybody brings their crazy concepts and the giant televisions and the super bright projectors. You saw something unique in the world of TVs. Tell us about it.
Julian Chokkattu: I saw not one, but two transparent TVs, although maybe TVs is a bit of a stretch for Samsung, because they just showed off a glass screen that was not really a TV and it was just a concept showing off their technology. LG had an actual transparent television using OLED technology. When I first told my wife at the end of the day, “Oh, I saw a transparent television,” she said, “Why would I want a transparent television?”
Then I thought about it and I didn’t have a great answer other than LG said you could put it in front of a window and not block the access. Then still the cool thing about this one, it has a rollable element mixed in. When you do want to watch a normal movie in full normal OLED fidelity, there’s this rollable contrast film that rolls up and so it makes the whole thing opaque, and now you can actually get all that contrast and looks great. Then roll it down and it’s transparent and you can still use the television and see content on the screen. There’s going to be different types of user interface elements that are going to be different from a traditional TV. You can expect things just hovering on the display like the weather and the clock and things like that.
There are things that I think I could see a use case for, and obviously this is the first thing that they’re launching, and this is the TV and it’s not a concept unlike Samsung’s, which is using micro LED and that was definitely brighter than the OLED version I saw. But again, Samsung’s was just a concept, but LG’s is going to be on sale later this year. It’s going to be a limited series. The rollable TVs that they announced a few years ago started at $100,000.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Julian Chokkattu: I’m going to assume, they did not share the price, but I’m going to assume these are going to also cost $100,000 if not more. This is the sort of thing where you can expect in four to five years perhaps this will trickle down and become a lot more affordable. Perhaps this might lead to a transparent phone like in Iron Man one day. I don’t know. That’s all what we’re … It’s everywhere. Iron Man is the thing that everyone calls back to at CES every year. I feel like this is another one of those things.
Michael Calore: Because of the see-through phone in the movie?
Julian Chokkattu: Yeah, the see-through phone. Yeah, so it was cool. It’s still just one of those things. LG themselves were like, this is going to be really popular with interior designers. When that’s your first demographic that your product … Yeah, I mean, it’s definitely visually very exciting and very cool to look at, but practically, TV makers seem to really hate the black screen of a TV, that when it’s turned off they’re constantly saying, “Your TV’s just black in your room.” Right now in this hotel room. The TV’s just black. It’s just, my God. You guys make these things right? You hate it so much that that was the one other selling point, transparent means that you can put art behind your TV or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Adrienne So: Do you know what else is transparent, Julian? Fish tanks. Everyone loves a fish tank. Interior designers—
Julian Chokkattu: But you can’t watch The Witcher on a fish tank.
Adrienne So: That is true.
Michael Calore: Not yet.
Julian Chokkattu: Not yet. One day it’ll be baked in.
Jeremy White: LG are already working on it.
Julian Chokkattu: Yes, actually yeah. They did have a fish tank animation, actually.
Adrienne So: Oh, my God.
Julian Chokkattu: We’re almost there. Yeah.
Adrienne So: Oh, my God, I am an interior designer. What am I doing here? I should switch careers.
Michael Calore: Adrienne, you cover a lot of wearable technology for WIRED, you cover a lot of health tech. Tell us about some of the trends you’re seeing in those worlds here at the show.
Adrienne So: As I was getting off the plane into my Lyft to the hotel, the car in front of me had a big billboard for Menopause The Musical, which seems to be everywhere in CES right now. I don’t know if this is one of those cases where if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, but it feels to me like this is the year that suddenly everybody at CES woke up to the fact that half of the population is criminally underserved.
One of the things we highlighted this year was an at-home urinary tract infection test, which can help. Here I am, I’m sitting in a room with three dudes. I don’t know if any of you even know why a UTI test is so important, but six out of 10 women have them. It’s one of the most miserable yet common afflictions that people have that nobody really talks about.
The fact that you can diagnose it in under two minutes at home and use your phone app to send the information directly to your doctor was like … That just blew my mind. All the wearables are coming out with passive cycle-detecting technology, so you can learn to predict when your period is coming and not just randomly bleed out when you’re just walking around or swimming with sharks or whatever it is that you do.
A lot of, in accordance with the billboard that I saw coming in, there is a lot of perimenopause and menopause detection technology, when it comes to wearables. One of the ones that I found was a vasomotor sensor that can automatically detect night sweats and hot flashes, which helps you regulate your sleep disturbances. It’s really hard to fall asleep when you’re sweating. I haven’t experienced any of this personally yet, but perimenopause and menopause can last over 10 to 15 years of your life and affects half the people on planet Earth. I mean, I’m not a scientist or anything, I’m not a biologist. I don’t know exactly how many people that is, but half of all the people on earth is a lot of people. Half of the people are going to go through this, and we don’t know anything about it.
I asked my own doctor about this, actually, and he was like, “Are you sure you want to know? Wouldn’t you just rather see what happens?” That is not a question, that is not something that I’ve ever said to myself. It just feels like this is the first year where a lot of women are … People are acknowledging that a lot of women really do want more information about what’s going on in their bodies.
Michael Calore: That’s great. I feel like this is happening at a time when health sensor technology and wearable technology, we’ve been exploring the limits of what’s capable with what we have right now over the last few years. There’s only so much you can do on somebody’s wrist. There’s only so much you can do with a sensor that lives in your toilet that you pee on. We’re getting to the edges of that. I think when a device maker looks at, “Well, what else can we do?” this seems like a natural place to go, because like you said, there’s not a lot there.
Adrienne So: Yeah, a lot of these study cohorts are starting out with 100 or 150 women. We just don’t know enough yet. There’s so many algorithms yet to be developed. Very exciting.
Michael Calore: Yeah. One of the other big things that we saw in the world of wearable technology was gesture control, right? This has been creeping into the world over the last year or two.
Adrienne So: It’s been creeping into this world with augmented reality and the mixed reality systems and just the way that the digital and physical worlds are interacting, or as I like to say “phidgital.” And I just watched everybody in this room wince simultaneously, but it’s the greatest word. Why would you say “hybrid” when you could say “phidgital”?
There are so many different new devices that are letting you interact with the world in different physical or digital ways. One of the ones that we highlighted was the palm plug, which was really cool. The palm plug attaches sensors to all five of your fingers and the palm of your hands. Not only does it provide you haptic feedback, like it taps you and gives you vibrations or haptic feedback whenever you’re doing something wrong, but it also lights up. There’s a multisensory component.
I also saw a ring that lets you whisper into it, so that you don’t have to wear a big VR headset or goggles. You can take them outside. You don’t have to wear mixed reality glasses. I know you guys saw a bunch of different other things.
Julian Chokkattu: Yeah, I saw Doublepoint, which is the first time I’ve ever heard someone making something for Wear OS, which is nice, because that platform from Google doesn’t really get a lot of third-party action. Doublepoint essentially enables any modern Wear OS watch to get the same types of gesture controls that you might see on an Apple Watch.
There’s double tap, and you can use that to … You can basically use it as a mouse in a browser. The intention here is really using the Wear OS watch you’ve already bought and are wearing as an interface option for mixed reality.
Apple Vision Pro is coming very soon. We all know that. They’re going all-in on hands as the interface tool. Everyone was trying to find out different ways to do that, whether it’s with a watch or a camera pointed at your fingers and that’s what it’s going to be, which is essentially what we all expected it to be, because that’s what movies have been telling us for years.
Michael Calore: They’re calling in all hands. Sorry, had to go there. OK, let’s take another break and we’ll come right back.
[Break]
Michael Calore: All right, we don’t really have a traditional show this week. I mean, we’re in a hotel room for God’s sake, and there’s planes taking off outside. We’re not going to do the traditional thing where we go around the room and ask everybody for a recommendation. But because this is CES, I want to do a lightning round, and I do want to go around the room and ask everybody what the coolest or weirdest or most fun thing they saw this week was. Jeremy White, you go first
Jeremy White: Without question, the weirdest thing I think I’ve ever seen at CES is something called Wehead, W-E-H-E-A-D, Wehead, and—
Adrienne So: You forgot wehead.com.
Jeremy White: Wehead.com. It was a beautiful moment at Pepcom, actually, where on their sign at the back of the room, they had Wehead and then they just scrawled in black marker, “.com,” next to their brand name. It was a very small company, as you could tell, but what they had was this … It looked like a, you see in jeweler’s shop windows with those head mannequins, where they put jewelry on. But there was something very odd about it and it was all angular and square and I thought, “What on Earth is that?”
It turned out that it was another thing that they’d shoved ChatGPT into, and it was a voice assistant that you could speak to, and it’d be a companion in your home, or it could be some office tool as well, take minutes and so on or listen to meetings. But it was so physically weird and distracting. I don’t know how anybody could live with it. It wasn’t a face, it wasn’t spherical or round, it was angular and made of cuboids. As you got close, you realized it was four Samsung phones. We found out later it was Samsung phones. It was four Samsung phones squashed together in a face-like format with then a video of a face up on it. It almost like Max Headroom gone wrong.
Michael Calore: That was my impression of it. It felt like the weird ’80s, very early cyberpunk, kind of … Yeah. Something out of a Laurie Anderson video.
Jeremy White: Oh, God, yeah.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Jeremy White: The guy said to me, he said, “Talk to it. Talk to it.” I said, “I don’t want to talk to it.”
Adrienne So: I think this guy was capitalizing on a missed opportunity. Why invent your own proprietary hardware, when you can just stick four phones together in the shape of a head? I think this was absolute genius. I commend him. I’m giving him a—
Jeremy White: He was very proud of it.
Adrienne So: Yes.
Jeremy White: He was very proud.
Adrienne So: Giving him my own award.
Jeremy White: The funny thing, but as he was talking to me about it, explained to me, Adrienne was very kindly trying to video it at the same time as well. I just couldn’t look at her, because her eyes were getting wider and wider and wider as he described more and more about this product. It was just bonkers. Look it up wehead.com. Do them a favor.
Michael Calore: It’s one of the great things about the show, is that people just take the biggest, weirdest swings.
Adrienne So: I love it.
Jeremy White: Oh, my, where is this going?
Michael Calore: It’s fun. It’s what makes it fun.
Jeremy White: It is. It was worth having just for that.
Adrienne So: It’s four phones glued together in the shape of a head.
Jeremy White: Yes. That’s the elevator—
Adrienne So: You just can’t do anything better.
Jeremy White: That’s the elevator pitch.
Adrienne So: Yeah.
Jeremy White: When someone got in the elevator, “I’ve got an idea for you.” This is like—
Adrienne So: And that person would be like, “Yes, check mark, check mark.”
Michael Calore: Julian, tell us about the thing that you saw that you can’t get out of your head.
Julian Chokkattu: I guess I have to say the Rabbit r1, which actually looked very unique and different. It’s a pocket-size device. It’s made in collaboration with the design firm Teenage Engineering. It looks pretty slick and somewhat retro. There’s a little screen on it, there’s a scroll wheel, a 360-degree camera on it that you can flip back and forth and a push and talk button. When you press and hold the talk button, you can basically ask it to perform menial tasks that you would typically do on a smartphone.
The interesting thing about this is that it’s using a large language model from ChatGPT to understand what you’re talking about. The other side of it is now introducing “large action models.” The whole idea is that it’s actually understanding and executing on what you want. This is like a step above the traditional digital voice assistant, where you can actually ask it, “Hey, get me an Uber to the airport and also put this on my calendar.”
It’s like mixing your services together in a way that your apps before have never really worked together in that way. But also they can do complex things by basically the company Rabbit has trained a lot of these normal menial functions like reserving a dinner at a restaurant. It basically has trained a lot of these Rabbits, is what they’re calling it, to go out and do these tasks. You can connect your services to the Rabbit device to r1 and essentially have it just perform all of these tasks.
The cool thing about this thing is the camera. It’s called the Rabbit Eye. You point it at, like let’s say if you have your laptop open, you do every day you do this simple task of their example was removing a watermark from an image, which is kind of a weird thing to give an example for. But let’s say that you’re constantly doing that and you now point the r1 at your laptop screen and it records what you’re doing. You’re essentially teaching it how to do the thing that you are often doing.
Now it understands, it learns it, and now can do the thing that you want it to do. Now, you can just press and hold the button and say, “Hey, remove the watermark from this other image,” and it’ll now do that so you don’t ever have to do that. One of the other examples they had given was they were playing the game Diablo IV, the character has to kill enemies, survive and level up. They put the camera and point it at the screen, they taught the Rabbit to have the character not die and taught it how to kill the enemies and survive. They basically are saying that theoretically you can now train a Rabbit to keep your game character alive until you hit a certain level.
Now you don’t have to grind, do all the menial things that you don’t really want to do in that game and get to the thing that is more enjoyable. The whole idea is take the basic smartphone stuff that you have to do these days that is a little annoying to do on your phone. Just ask the thing without having to touch a bunch of different interfaces, juggle between apps and all of that.
Adrienne So: You’re forgetting the most important thing about stuff made by Teenage Engineering, Julian, which is that I have no clue what most of it does and I know that most of it is expensive, but it’s just so cute that I just want it anyway.
Julian Chokkattu: It is very cute and surprisingly not that expensive. I mean, it’s $199 bucks and again, it’s sort of like that weird device that you don’t really know if it’s going to be useful or not yet. It could be absolutely useless. It could be very cool and very unique. It’s coming out in March, so we don’t have to wait too long to find out.
Michael Calore: Yeah.
Julian Chokkattu: It’s on the hype wave of things like the humane AI pen, writing that ChatGPT personal AI companion. But this is trying to actually do actions for you. It could be cool.
Michael Calore: Right on.
Julian Chokkattu: Yeah.
Jeremy White: I’m sold, actually listening to that. Now I want to try it.
Adrienne So: Mm-hmm. I know. I didn’t-
Julian Chokkattu: They didn’t have a demo, so that was a disappointing thing, where I went all the way there, did not actually have any demos, so I did not know anything about how it actually ends up, is going to end up working. But it is exciting I feel like. There’s an idea there and I hope it works, because it sounds cool.
Michael Calore: We only have to wait a few months?
Julian Chokkattu: Yeah. Until March.
Michael Calore: Great.
Julian Chokkattu: Yeah.
Michael Calore: OK, Adrienne, what’s the thing that you saw this week that blew you away or made you laugh?
Adrienne So: We just tested it and doing the video, Julian and I made a video, made a test. I am mildly afraid that everyone is going to think I’m a Segway paid actor or something, but I had to be physically dragged away from the new Segway go-kart. The sun was setting, it was approaching freezing temperatures. Segway had started packing everything away and I was like, “No, no, don’t make me go.”
It’s a three in one go-kart. Not only is it a go-kart, that you can actually ride around on the streets. I had been testing electric bikes with Segway and then the Segway PR spokesperson just leaned down and he put it in race mode. He was like, “I saw you testing those bikes. I think this is what you want to do.”
That was exactly what I did want to do. It’s so cute and light, the pickup is so fast. Then, when you’re done doing that, which you may never be, the back could decouples into a hoverboard. When you’re in a space where they might arrest you for driving a go-kart, you just simply swap out for your hoverboard and just start hovering around people. But then when you’re done with that, it turns into a racing simulator. It’s compatible with most major gaming consoles and platforms.
When it’s too cold to race outside as it was slowly beginning to be here in Vegas, you can just go inside and just play all of your standard racing games. You can play with your friends online. If you’re getting really sick of trying to keep up with your friends, you have full on racing Sims on your dinky little computer or whatever. You just get a Segway go-kart and you just start racing them in your home. It was incredible. When I was stomping on the gas, the whole cart was just flexing. Every time I saw 360 haptic feedback, I was trying to drift and smashing it into the walls of tunnels.
Julian Chokkattu: There’s a lot of smashing.
Adrienne So: There was a lot of smashing. You are the one who told me to try to drift, Julian. I don’t take full responsibility for this. I was like, “I saw the Fast and the Furious three, I know exactly how this is done.” It was like full 360 haptic feedback. By the time they could pull me off of this thing, Segway had unfortunately packed up all the scooters and Julian could no longer try them. But I regret nothing. I regret nothing. This is what CES is for. It’s for going really fast and frustrating your coworkers.
Julian Chokkattu: I mean, the go-kart was genuinely one of the things that they keep talking about it and you’re like, “It does what?” Then the back decouples into a hoverboard. I don’t know why anyone would want the hoverboard part of it, but that was cool to see. Then the fact that you bring it in and you plug your go-kart into your game console and then you use it as a racing sim. It was so weird, but also makes a lot of sense. It was kind of cool. You’re not going to use your go-kart all the time. The fact that now I can bring it in and actually have a use for it inside my house and with my racing games, I thought that was really cool and smart.
Adrienne So: It solves the problem of go-kart storage.
Julian Chokkattu: It does.
Adrienne So: Because can just simply store it in the middle of your living room.
Julian Chokkattu: In the living room. Yeah. Yeah.
Adrienne So: I mean, there were so many features of the go-kart, I was just like… I mean, I was in a tiny parking lot. I could not go full throttle in the parking lot, but then, when you’re just stomping on the gas, and you could just feel the whole cart flex and shudder. I was like, “That’s right. This is me. I’m exactly like the Indy. I’m exactly like the Formula One autonomous drivers. I am Max Verstappen.” Right? It ruled. It was awesome. I’m really nailing the CES.
Michael Calore: Are they coming out with it soon?
Adrienne So: Yes. Oh, my gosh. You can pre-order them now, actually. They will be shipping on February.
Julian Chokkattu: 1st.
Adrienne So: 1st.
Michael Calore: I know what to get you for Orthodox Christmas.
Adrienne So: Mardi Gras.
Michael Calore: Yeah, Mardi Gras.
Adrienne So: You can get it for me for Mardi Gras.
Michael Calore: Yeah. Your household celebrates Mardi Gras.
Adrienne So: Yes, we do. I was about to burst into singing, but then I decided not to, because I’m really mature and restrained. Please someone stop me. I’m like-
Michael Calore: Well, my pick is the same pick that I have every year, which is my bed. My bed is absolutely the most exciting thing I’ve seen at CES this year.
Adrienne So: Yeah. It really is.
Julian Chokkattu: To be fair, it is a better bed than last year.
Michael Calore: That’s true. Yes. We did upgrade, get the hotel upgrade package this year. Thanks, Conde Nast. But really, the show is a big show. It’s physically large. It takes hours some days to get from one side of the event space to the other side. You walk three or four miles a day easily.
Julian Chokkattu: Yeah.
Michael Calore: You sleep maybe five hours a night. As a journalist, you get here two days earlier than everybody else and you have to cover it for a lot longer than most people spend here. It is a grind. Thanks everybody, for sitting here late at night and recording this, because we’re all very tired.
Julian Chokkattu: It is the job.
Adrienne So: Not me. I am gaining more energy as I go on. I’m kidding.
Michael Calore: Yeah, we’ll keep you away from the go-kart simulators from now on. All right, well that is our show for this week. Adrienne, Julian, Jeremy, thank you for being here. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for coming all the way to Las Vegas, to sit here with me.
Julian Chokkattu: Happy birthday, Mike.
Jeremy White: Happy birthday, Mike.
Adrienne So: Happy Birthday.
Michael Calore: Guys, we don’t talk about my birthday on the podcast for OPSEC reasons, didn’t’ you get the memo? All right, well, thank you. I appreciate that. 39 once again. Thank you all for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on the various social medias. Just check the show notes. Our producer is the excellent Boone Ashworth and we will be back in the studio, with a professionally recorded episode of Gadget Lab next week. Until then, goodbye.
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