Televisions are found in almost every home and sometimes considered as a part of interior decoration. Just like a smartphone smart TV has the capability of connecting to the internet. They also have applications that help the view control it easily. Imagine a TV with apps like youtube, facebook, twitter, and a browser that you can access. Some of these smart tv incorporate AI to allow facial and voice recognition.
Televisions have experienced a great change in history. The first televisions started appearing in the 1800s and they were mechanical, unlike today which is electrical. The mechanical one was displaying onto screen images that had been mechanically screened. They were rudimentary compared to the modern and electronic ones. In 1907 Russians inventors combined mechanical scanning and cathode ray tube to develop a new television.
In 1927 Philo Taylor Farnsworth a 21-year old invented electronic TV. He never lived in a room with electricity but when he started going to school he had a dream of recording moving images, store them in the form of code which can be moved along radio waves to a different device. His technology was able to capture real-time images with the help of beam electrons. The invention transmitted the first image which was a simple line. Later dollar sign was transmitted when an investor joked to him about the time his invention will display some dollars. By 1934 all TVs were electrical and the mechanical ones had been doomed and they were now becoming obsolete. They couldn’t compete with this new electrical invention. Most of these televisions were transmitting images in black and white. These electrical televisions relied on CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) with one or more anodes. These cathodes could be heated and release a beam of electrons to the vacuum tube. These electrons were attracted to the positive part of the screen and display the moving images.
Today we have liquid crystal displays (LCD) which are flat or curved inside unlike the old bulky CRT TVs. Unlike electrical TVS which emit light directly, LCD uses a backlight to produce colored images. The liquid crystalline nature was discovered in extraction from carrots by Friedrich Reinitzer in 1888 while later George H. Heilmeier invented the LCDs. Many other inventors contributed to the improvement and By 2000s the image quality of LCD surpassed the CRT.
Now as AI takes shape in transforming the world, television technology is also applying it to transform their industry developing AITV. Imagine having an intelligent TV in your room. You can connect it to Alexa or Siri. LG has a brand that is incorporating AI. It can use Echo and Alexa to control your entertainment. It can change your channel, select your favorite movie, adjust the volume, start, stop, and adjust your brightness. You can control your other house smart devices that can connect to your smart tv via Bluetooth and talk to the devices while watching.
The LG ThinkQ AI TV has google assistance built-in it. This Smart TV is designed such that it can serve as a central smart home hub that can help you access other smart home devices. LG is also researching and making smart TVs such as OLED SUPER UHD Model which will have fun features like FLD (Full-Array Dimming) for better color enhancement, NLP (Natural Language Processing)to enhance noise reduction and Intelligent voice recognizer, a processor for images, give a perception of life images and also it can support HFR (high frame rate) content.
AI and IoT are changing our experience of how we watch our television and interact with our smart devices in our smart homes.

For more information, you can see https://www.lg.com/levant_en/oled-tvs

We keep hearing of AI cameras but we have no have a clear idea of what it is all about. AI application nowadays is very common in almost everything. Let’s explore more about these smart AI cameras and get to know how exactly they affect us. Let us start with a believe history of cameras. 

The first camera was the pinhole camera which dates back to middle ages. It reproduced the image with the same colors and preserving it. Nicéphore Niépce invented is remembered for his experiment with photography in 1816 with his heliography device. He used to capture images from his office window. The light from the window could react with chemicals and create a photo. It was a long eight hours process the photo could even fade away after a while. His former partner Louis Daguerre made a daguerreotype camera that used a silver plate sheet made of copper which could record a photo. This is considered the first invention. The birth of the hand camera was later when Richard Maddox invented the first dry plate made of gelatin. The paper film was first made by George Eastman in 1985 where later he made the Kodak Camera which could take 100 photos. The smaller camera was invented in 1913 by Oskar Barnack where it boosted commercial purposes after World War 1. In 1988 the first digital camera was invented though it was not available in the market until 1991 when Kodak made their first digital camera. 

 The first CCTV was invented in Germany by Siemens to help observe rockets launching during the second world war in 1942. The commercial CCTV system was introduced in 1949 in the USA. In 1968 VCR advance CCTV was invented and New York City installed the first street CCTV cameras in the city. The system later advanced and it was replaced with digital recorders making it possible to run and monitor everything without supervision and install the system easily. 

The camera technology making further progress by incorporating artificial intelligence. 

How will these AI cameras affect our life? They help in requisite photo enhancement or processing in real-time. Many smartphones use facial recognition to unlock it which is an AI technology that analysis your face and recognizes it. It will even recognize when you have dreadlocks or when you have shaved and still unlock your smartphone. 

Besides smartphone cameras, there are wireless security cameras for our smart homes. They are not expensive and they provide professional monitoring. These smart cameras help to keep your smart home safe all the time whether it’s an outdoor or your indoor. The cameras record HD video coverage evidence which you can access any time you want remotely using your phone. You can imagine how interesting it is monitoring your home or office work when you are on a vocation.  

Some of the best cameras examples are, 

• Wyze Cam v2 HD – it is an indoor wireless camera with excellent night vision. It works with Alexa and you can use your voice to tell it to show you around your home.
• A Maximus smart HD camera that has motion-activated for the outdoor floodlight.
• Nest Smart camera. It works as a doorbell and it can tell you who is knocking and talk to him remotely wherever you are. 

Others include Amazon Cloud smart indoor camera, Nest cam outdoor security camera, and August Doorbell Cam. 

The wireless smart security cameras help you access your recordings without hassle or wiring interconnections. They are flexible hence you can move them to your desired point. They have a good power back up which will make them continue monitoring even when there are power outages. You can easily expand your monitoring syatem by adding new cameras with time. The best thing with them is remotely accessing your recording evidence which will help you get to know anything happening around your home or office through your smart devices. 

Google is known for researching and coming up with great solutions to our daily life by using ML, AI, and IoT. One of their products is google home which you can use for your home automation. It is one of the serious smart device speakers or digital voice assistants which was rolled out in 2016 at google headquarters of I/O. It can help you automate your smart home. 

Google home has improved the way we listen to our music unlike when people used to play music or play the piano. You can imagine how life was when you the only thing in your house to play music with was a piano. You cant talk to it to play music or tell it to control anything else. One of these oldest pianos which we can compare with is found in the Metropolitan Museum of art in new york dating back 1720s. Unfortunately, the first one which was made in the 1700s no longer exists. The best thing is now with google home you can tell it to play a piano key and you don’t need those huge wooden piano keyboards though it is considered to be a fashion to have them in your house.

Why have google home in your house?

If you want to command all your home appliances with your voice then Google home allows you to do so. The smart speaker comes in three types. 

1. Google Home smart speaker – It is not such a powerful speaker for your smart home but its a device that makes good use of your voice to command your interconnected devices with the help of google assistance. 
2. Google Home Mini smart speaker – it is a small beautiful looking ball although it sounds not that powerful although it will control your home appliances and other devices conveniently. 
3. Google Home Max smart speaker – It produces a strong sound with bass and you can even connect it with max models to produce a powerful sound. It has 6 powerful onboard microphones that can hear your sound from far. It is very convenient for the automation of your smart home. 

Google Home smart speakers compete very well with other smart devices like Alexa. Among the best models is the max. Mini is the best in your vehicle or on go. 

What can google home do around your smart home; 

Hubs 

Smart home hubs can do well with google home. You can tie all your devices together with it for easy control. 

Insteon control

Devices may face difficulties in communication and Insteon hub control helps a lot since it is a closed system. Google home works very well with Insteon wifi cameras for security purposes or Insteon thermostat in regulating your house temperature. 

Samsung Smart Appliances 

Samsung has many smart appliances products, ranging from refrigerators, smart TVs and microwaves. Google Home is very compatible with these home appliances. 

Google Home also supports wink hub 2 which gives you many options for connectivity making it easier to control your devices on your phone. It also helps you control your thermostart by speaking to it. You can also use it to control your lighting using your smart bulbs. 

Google home is implementing AI combining it with ML and IoT to bring to make a smart home dream come true. We might think we are getting to the climax of technology but in the coming years, AI will make our homes look a magic hub. The future google home AI may tell you how many people are in your house and what are they doing at that moment. The AI awareness home will maybe have everything ready for you like you wake up and find a ready-made coffee and breakfast. You will only need to tell google home what you want for breakfast. 

Smart Devices are becoming our basic needs in this error of AI, IoT, and ML. You can now sync your home with smart devices to control your house lighting, your refrigerator and all your home appliances with Alexa. This was not the case many years ago and people relied on the old music system to keep their homes attractive and conducive.

Victrola phonograph the oldest smart home of old times

This device was invented in 1877 which could record and reproduce sounds, unlike our Alexa which you can command to do something for you. Victor Talking Machine Company made it with the idea of house furniture rather than a music sound machine. By 1906 the device was a hit and made many sales. It was characterized by different sizes and designs to match with interior designs. It had challenges when changing the music as one had to go deep inside the cabinet to change the music by lifting the needle but later the manufacturer fixed it in later versions. Later they made new models that were valuable and many are preserved in museums. 

This opened up to the making of the table radios which were used to receive signals in the early 1900s. Before radios were used for music only. Later models allowed CD players. Unfortunately or fortunately all the old radio technology is being replaced by smart devices like Alexa. 

Amazon Alexa

Amazon Alexa is one of the virtual assistant devices that is implementing Artificial Intelligence to solve your home problems since November 2014. You can speak to it and it gives you back the results you want like adjusting your house temperature. The Amazon Echo dot speakers were the first to use it. Now it is taking over home automation by just using voice assistants. 

Why should you connect your home devices with Alexa?

Imagine in your home bored and you can just ask what is the latest news, how is the weather outside, how is the traffic. This is fun and entertaining. You can connect Alexa with devices using a hub or setting up your echo dot directly around your home to control them with just your voice. There are a lot of Alexa options for your smart home;

Control your light

You can integrate Alexa with your smartphone. You can tell Alexa to turn on or off or change the color. Connecting Alexas with your devices is one of the coolest features of the device. Alexa can detect or Discover the devices nearby. You can now use your Alexa compatible bulbs as instructed by the manufacturer and be on the same wifi with all your devices. Its easier to interconnect these devices whether its bulbs or smart switches. You can use the names you have given your bulbs to control them. 

Control your house temperature 

Depending on the weather you can direct Alexa to control your Thermostats automatically and keep your room comfortable. 

Control your smart tv 

You can select a lot of menus with Alexa to give you a good home entertainment experience. 

With Alexa, you can connect it with your Alexa-compatible Smart Locks, integrate it with a smart camera and create your favorite music playlist. 

Alexa is now considered as one of the computers that can talk by implementing AI in it to work magically. It can even sense the emotions and determine the context of the conversation, engagement, tone, and memory. This helps it either create emotionally complex or conceptually conversations. 

This is just a short believe explanation of how Alexas is changing our smart home by connecting to other devices that make use of AI technology. You can also see how the house devices have evolved from old radios to smart devices. Technology is making our homes more entertaining and fun to live in. 

Working smatter and currents technology trends are playing an important role in how people work in offices. Technology controlling how people work in offices be it video conferencing, controlling temperature, keeping a check on employees and having an office that recognizes you.

Our ancestors didn’t work the way we work today and they would be shocked if the woke up today and find out how we work. Rome is the home of offices among many other inventions and before that many tasks were carried out in personal homes. Daily accounting, house tasks, and paperwork were carried out by clerks who were employed by homeowners. In the 1726 century, the most dedicated buildings meant for offices were built in Britain. It was built for the royal family. It still exists today and it is now referred to as Ripley Building. Although it has been renovated for sometimes, its offices, lords rooms, and staterooms are still intact. East India house built in 1729 was another great multipurpose office built. With the rise of bureaucracy which was complex because of the long-distance trade with Asia and India. The offices were characterized by working long hours and many employees were not happy with the office making them depressed and even some could commit suicide. The 20th century is marked with the birth of an open office plan. It had poor air conditioning, lighting and workers sat on their desks in rows while their managers kept an eye on them. Later these officers were replaced by ‘socially democratic’ offices in countries like the Netherlands and Germany due to activists who were fighting for their employees. 

There are many types of offices depending on the needs they are fulfilling. They could be, Leased offices to be used for a certain period of a contract you agree with the owner. A rental office is another type where you can rent on a monthly bases. Others include home office, co-working space, and Virtual office. 

With the rise of technology, many offices will now be like smart homes, self-controlling lighting, appliances which help in sustainable energy consumption. The offices will now be more comfortable for many employees and productive for many businesses who aimed to make profits. While the smart offices are the way to go, it may be a bit complicated because it aimed at making high revenues, uses a lot of data and has complex communication flow. How will smart offices apply technology?

Internet-of-Things in smart offices

IoT will help to interconnect many office devices for real-time transfer and process of data automatically. This interconnection technology of devices will make office life easy by changing how workers relate with their customers through messaging platforms, mobile apps and scheduling of duties. 

PiPA BroadSource

This is the coolest system that can use your mobile data to provide a real-time presence in the office. It uses the hardware sensors of a smartphone to record the behavior of the user around the office like movements, locations, orientation, calender, and proximity to indicate whether you are around the office. 

Smarter conferencing

There are many conferencing technologies nowadays and now the next step is to make them real-time and efficient using virtual reality and recognition solutions. This helps show who is talking, adjust audio and video automatically, start meetings, invite intended attendees only, switch to the relevant speaker and can change the theme of the room.

A very good example of such an office is the Deloitte office building in Amsterdam. The office has an app that can schedule your daily activities, assign you your favorite desk, help you control the lighting and heat. It can recognize your bike and car and guide around the office parking. 

Technology AI and IoT are making smart offices transition real. Soon all offices building may be connected making office work smart and efficient. The process may be at its infancy but we need to wait and see how far it will go.

Your kitchen needs to be equipped with a smart fridge that can tell you your drinks or foodstuffs are getting low, help you to create a shopping list or you can order drinks from it directly. With the advancement in technology kitchen appliances are going smart with Artificial intelligence.

500B.C. Ice was preserved in houses the whole year for preserving food. Romans and Greeks used pits with ice for preservation While Egyptians placed containers outside to cool overnight. The first refrigeration was invented in 1740s where they discovered heating liquid to a gas helped in refrigeration. This idea still holds in our modern refrigerators. In 1802 Thomas Moore invented and patented a box made for preserving daily products. He called this box a refrigerator. Demand for food preservation continued to grow which boosted the economy and developments. In 1840s carpenters made insulated wooden iceboxes for preservation. This method of using ice posed serious health problems and it had to come to an end. In 1876 Carl Von Linde patented the first reliable technology of liquefying a gas. The idea used an ammonia gas for the process which made it adaptable in many industries. Fred Wolf invented the electric refrigerator used in many houses. The technology continued to grow with many inventions. Most of them lead to accidents when the gases leaked. Others consumed a lot of energy leading to energy labeling programs which helped users compare the efficiency of energy use.

Four major types of refrigeration

1. Mechanical compression. It compresses the refrigerants into a solid and turns it to hot gas. These refrigerants release heat when they condense and absorb it when they boil.
2. Absorption refrigeration. This is a process that removes heat by absorbing and heating refrigerants instead of compressing them.
3. Evaporative Cooling is another method where the water absorbs the heat as it evaporates.
4. The thermoelectric method of refrigeration uses an electric current and a thermocouple which heat on one end and cools on the other. The cold part absorbs heat cooling the surrounding area.

Now companies like LG and Samsung are applying the internet of things to advance refrigeration technology. Samsung went further fixing it with cameras that can show you when the foodstuffs are about to get spoiled.

LG Instaview refrigerator is a smart kitchen appliance that will amaze you. It utilizes AI to control your recipes based on what you have stored in it. It can even use ThinkQ oven to prepare your dinner step. It has an LCD touchscreen which you can see through and at the same time, it has a computer display. To select the option that you want you just double-tap. It can verbally guide you using the Amazon Alexa and you can also command it using your voice. It comprises of LG WebOS too.

You can set it to wash your dish based on what was cooked in it smart oven. It can detect the expiry date of what is preserved inside, make you a shopping list and show different recipes.

Despite having a voice commands built-in Alexa, it is also controlled remotely using LG mobile app. Smartphones and refrigerators can create and share photos, recipes, and shopping lists instantly. The inside camera can help you check remotely what is inside your fridge. It matches your interior style and easy to clean. Unlike old fridges in consumes less energy and it has convenient safety features like an automatic closing door, door alarm, and a child lock. It can also help you order from Amazon when your stock is running low. IT is part of LG ThinkQ Artificial intelligent powered hence works with other LG products that use the technology.

Automation is shaping the smart market and turning the dream of smart homes into reality. In the future, AI will be the core-based of how our home appliances operates. The problem is that we don’t know the dangers of this home automation.

Artificial intelligence is making your sleep comfortable and fun. You will no longer wake up tired again. An AI-powered bed can learn your sleeping patten and regulate your dynamic bed temperature automatically. This contributes to achieving optimal sleep, rest, recovery, and fitness.

After a short time of using your mattress, you consider it old and throw it away. Interestingly the oldest bed dates back 77,000 years ago. It was discovered in South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal. It was made of plants that were put together to make layers that were periodical to get lid of pest. The bend was huge enough for a family around 22 square feet. Grass beds were common among the prehistoric nomads around 8000BC. An example of such bed was spotted in Hinds Cave Texas which was speculated was used by hunters and gatherers. It was a comfortable oval bed which kept one warm during the night. Around 1000BC and 3000BC Egyptians who were known for early technology inventions and many advancements invented a raised bed. This kept one off the ground from the floor cold. It was made of wood and jewels and gold for special people in the community. It had a wool cushion mattress and wooden pillows. Wealthier ancient Romans slept on metal beds which were raise. Bed technology went on improving and in 18th-century beds become beautiful and many people could afford comfortable beds. In the 19th century, bedrooms become more modern and luxulious. Metal beds with springs were invented this time.

Today there are many choices of beds characterized by different types and sizes;

1. A single bed model is meant for one or children and it the smallest bed of all even than the twin model and twin XL model.
2. A double Model bed is a comfortable bed meant for two people and has a large sleeping area. It is also referred to as a full bed model.

Other types are Kingsize, double-decker, letto zip, concealed, sonic bed, hanging bed, ottoman bed among others.

Artificial intelligence bed is improving the way we sleep. It taking beds technology to another level. An example of such a bed is the Bryte Bed which comprises sensors that can sense your weight distribution, the pressure that you are exerting on it, your sleep quality and your body temperature. It has a pneumatic system that controls the sixteen different zones of the bed. The system controls itself through the night adjusting the conditions silently. The AI system differentiates when two couples sleep at the same time or if it is one person sleeping and adjust according to their preferences.

The brain of this bed is the Aiden sleep “personal sleep expert”. It records and stores a lot of data which it uses to learn how each individual behaves when sleeping and adjusts accordingly even when one’s pattern changes it can learn and adjust. The smart bed can also connect with other smart home devices to provide a comfortable sleep experience. The system can adjust the lights and temperature automatically to create a mood that will make the user either sleep or wake up. The user can always set his preferences.

Eight Sleep Pod is another high-tech bend. It can control itself and also controlled manually. It can wake you up by using its thermal alarm which gradually begins to cool you the minutes before. This helps you wake up slowly without disturbance. The Pod’s biometric collects and records data of users’ sleep patterns, quality, duration and consistency which helps to measure the sleep fitness of the user. It also works with Philips Hue Lights, Amazon Alexa, and Google Nest. Pods bed has iOS and Android apps that help control the system.

With smart bed helps improve sleep performance and the ability to sleep well and control your night mood.