Think bigger: A washing machine and dryer with an arm and a camera.

It can sort your dirty and clean clothes before washing and after drying, based on your preferences.

It defaults to common sense things like washing similar materials and weights, keeping delicates in their own load, grouping sensitive colors like red.

It can insult the plumbing with "you're a dumb pipe".

same way that having wifi does. by providing no actionable value, but boosting marketing materials

WiFi is fine for notification although Bluetooth would be enough to not get forgotten cloths stuck there for days.

But why it calls home and why we have to create accounts to just get a notification.

Never mind washing machine, how about a missile or a drone?

Or a bomb.. "let there be light"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck

You load it, tell it what's in and it sets the program, tells you what it set and why. You approve and off it goes

I do that today by turning a dial and pressing the start button.

Not saying it's the superior way, but to be honest I wouldn't know how to start some washing machines without consulting manual first, having very dumb simple appliance myself.

I'm sure the manufacturer will figure out a way to:

a) Have it display advertising on a screen on its front size (like some fridges now)

b) Only work with approved laundry pods

c) Other new revenue generating opportunities for its manufacturer

Tell the washing machine. "Washlexa I'm putting my gym clothes in. It was a hard workout I sweated a lot!"

and the washer now knows what to do. No more temp, length, 2nd rinse proxy controls.

And result is tiny little clothes, because 80C seemed right for the job.

Washlexa:”Sorry, you were right I was supposed to use regular programme, but I used wrong one, do you want me to wash them again?”

make the "washing machine" a bucket with a robotic arm that you can put in any bathtub

I now picture people talking to their washing machine like the intro of american psycho.

I have seen smiling people talking to their connected car, replying with a dumb condescending bad-actor voice.

I had also seen Frankie Boyle in his parody of Knight Rider: "Michael, I am Kitt, your car, stop taking the medications, they want you to take them so you will be unable to talk to me"...

Washing machine was so inefficient whole time, it just heat water and spins. When you had to do by hand the hard decision is when to stop.

I believe there is a lot we can improve in washing machines

Assistive technology.

Imagine an energy efficient IC for a small multimodal model that can do voice to text, text to speech, question/answer, tool calling, and structured output.

Wire that up to a microcontroller that parses the structured output to constrain the model (rather than giving the model direct hardware access).

Now you have an assistive tech mode for supporting vision impaired users without requiring them to configure an app on their phone, pair devices, etc. And so now the user can just speak to the washing machine to tell it what to do.

And because models are getting better and better at multi-language support, you can rely on a single model to cover a wide range of spoken languages. And therefore you don't need a bunch of variants of this chip for a single product line.

TLDR this gives a path to replace "always online" and "wifi enabled" devices with fully on-device capabilities without being forced to abandon assistive technology support.

I don't think that the ability to record and transcribe people's words will encourage manufacturers to remove Wi-Fi functionality. If anything, that would encourage them to keep it. Imagine the marketing possibilities.

sure but once the capability is there it's not unlikely we'll see regulatory pressure from regions like the EU or certain US states to ban or heavily limit sale of "collect all your data" wifi enabled devices.

IMHO the only reason there's not been pushback from the EU already is because so much assistive tech is only possible with wireless connectivity currently. Once privacy conscious assistive tech is viable those crackdowns will probably be on the horizon even if only for the security risk associated with millions of internet connected devices with poor security posture.

that would be so cool, but it'll be a long time to make the cost of an AI chip cheaper than a wifi enabled one if that's even possible.

It can ponder the meaning of its existence.

"My Job Is To Open and Close Doors" [1]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49t-WWTx0RQ