The Vergecast - CES 2018: Robots, TVs, and virtual assistants

Episode Date: January 12, 2018

The Verge crew is on our way back home after a week at the Consumer Electronics Show 2018. This week, we did a ton of reporting, a ton of videos, and four live Circuit Breaker shows, so we did not have a lot of time to sit down and tape a full-length Vergecast. But what we did do was collect a bunch of audio recorded throughout the show — including clips from Circuit Breaker Live — to give you an idea of what it’s like to be at CES, and what kinds of things we saw this year. Enjoy, and we’ll see you next week. 00:44 - Day -1 03:14 - Day 0 24:54 - Day 1 45:30 - Day 2 1:05:02 - Day 3 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, welcome to the Vergecast. It's Neely. I'm by myself right now. Well, actually, I'm in the corner of the trailer with Andrew. We're at CS this week, and we did a ton of reporting. We shot a ton of videos, and we did four live Circurebreaker shows, so we didn't have a lot of time to sit down and do a full-length Vergecast. So here's what we just said. We collected a bunch of audio recorded throughout the week with the whole Verge crew, Andrew ran around, tipping everybody.

We put together a bunch of clips from the Circperbreaker show so that we could give you an idea of what it's like to be here at CES 2018, and all the things we saw this week. So enjoy this. It's going to be a little wild and crazy. It's going to fit right in with a Vergecast, and we'll see you again next week. It is day zero or maybe day negative one

of the Consumer Electronics Show, which is the biggest electronics show of the year. It's at the Las Vegas Convention Center where there's just miles, literally miles, to walk around and look at booths and look at gadgets. But that's a lot of work, and so what they do is they have this early event

that they call CES Unvealed. This is the kickoff to a week. week of incredible excitement, incredible innovation. And so a bunch of nerds line up with their gear and we sit on the floor and then we all run into this room where there's free food which lazy people will eat and then there's gadgets on little crappy tables with bad lighting and even worse looking carpet. And we get an early chance to play with what we hope are going to be the most exciting gadgets of CES. Hey, it's Chaim with the Verge. I'm with the Bellis 3D face scanner. It's a $500 attachment that you clip to the top of your Android phone or tablet,

and it takes these super fast, super realistic, super high-deaf 3D scans of your face. This gadget is essentially a belt that goes around your waist, and there are motion sensors in there. It senses that you're moving, and then once you fall, it inflates immediately into these airbags. This is the Relink Electric Scooter. It's small, it's relatively light, only about 20 to 30 pounds, and you can fold it up and store it in really tight spaces. This is next to out with the verge, and I'm using the Xenema SmartShirt Motion Controller.

It's a smart shirt with sensors that lets you control a character in a video game by moving your real body. The stuff that's at CES Unveiled, it is mostly stuff that will also be out on the convention center floor, but convention center floor booths are super duper expensive, and so not everybody pays for one of those.

And so sometimes the stuff that's at CES unveiled, it's literally just like a card table with a curtain on it and some people gadgets sitting on it because they could afford that, but they couldn't afford the main booth. And that works for them because what their goal is is to have journalists like us come and look at their stuff and decide whether or not we care to write about it. This is Gemini. He's a revised view of what was the traditional PDA of the 1990s.

So this is a full Android device and enables people to use a full physical, quirty keyboard. Everybody else at CES is they're here for us, but what they're really here for are to make deals to like get Best Buy to notice them, get somebody else to notice them. But if you're just, you've got a Kickstarter and you're not worried about Best Buy, it might be more worth your money to show off your gadget and a little side event like CES unveiled than it would to be on the main show floor. Hello, it's day 4,000 of CES. Technically, I think it's called day zero. It's Monday. So the show floor is not open yet. The show floor opens tomorrow. My job here at CES this year is robots and it kind of sucks because robots suck.

There's a few kinds of robots, right? There's suitcases that follow you. 90 fun puppy want luggage. Like a real puppy, it sort of just followed me around and then ran away or sometimes just fell over. There's faces that are just emotive versions of Alexa. I'm here with Buddy, a singing, dancing, family assistant robot. But I'm hoping to find some real robots.

LG has a real robot for hotel stuff. There's this company called Savioke that does a hotel robot. Segway, doing this robot that they've showed for a couple years, but now it's about ready to ship where you can ride it and then get off it and then put your groceries on it. I just was checking out this robot called Misty. This is Misty One Beta. It's by Misty Robotics, a company that spun out of Sphero

that I was really excited about. I was like, finally they're gonna make their dream robot, but it doesn't really do anything. So you can turn it, you can move it, you can set the speed. They like they haven't finished. Like that's the thing with robots. Robots are really, really, really hard to make. And you can't just try to make a robot

and get a pat on the back for it. You've got to make something that's actually useful. So that's the big question I'm asking. I'm trying to figure out this week is can anybody make a useful robot? We're here. Hello. You did it.

It's happening. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Circlebreaker Live. It's CES. I'm Eliat Patel. I'm Neili Patel. The Energy Earth's Deer Borg. Hello, everybody.

We have brought a special guest on the Circuit Breaker with us. We brought back a little something with the Virch called the hype area. Sam Schaeffer is here. Hey, everyone. Virge alumni. It's been a minute. So when you register for CES, you could register a number of different things.

There's some media. There's like industry analyst. One of the categories was key online influencer. Is that the one you picked? Yeah. That's our boy. Key online influence. I evolved in after I left.

Have you ever seen a Vergecast with Sam? It's going to be a lot like that. But we should talk about some news. There's been a ton of news. I think the biggest news happened while we were here, and so it's not strictly CES, but it was a big, big deal. GoPro was like in a financial statement, they're like, hey, things aren't going so well. By the way, we're shutting down all of our drone division.

So I asked Sean O'Kane, who's been covering GoPro in these drones, give me something smart to say about this, and he just looked at us and said, this was inevitable the second they recalled the karma drone on election night. Yeah. So it's been, you know. Is that what it was? It was election night. Yeah.

Wow. If that's a sign, I will say no more. If you remember, GoPro put out the karma drone, it was their big, new initiative. The drones fell out of the sky because the batteries were disconnecting inside the drone as they flew. GoPro recalled the drones. Fix them. They shipped them again. Yep. They were sort of okay. DJI was way out ahead.

Right. And so they're shuttering that business. They're shuddering that business. Not only are they shuddering that drone business. there are reports that the GoPro, the company has hired JP Morgan Chase to help see if anybody wants to buy them.

And so I think this is the question of the day here. We got a tweet from Brendan. Who got to snatch GoPro? There's like obvious answers. Right? You got your DJIs. You've got your Samsung's.

I think it's going to end up being just one of these Chinese companies that buys brands. It's going to be TCL. TCL or Hacare. They bought Palm. Now Palm phones will fly. That's a future of fault.

So you're more of a GoPro user for anybody I know. What's your... I have the Hero 4 Silver. I feel like someone told me, someone really smart told me that. I don't remember who it was, but it was smart. They said, if you, maybe it was Sean O'Kane. They said, if you have, if you want a GoPro,

you probably already have one, right? Like this notion about, like, there's a new GoPro every year, but most people already have a GoPro if they want a GoPro. Yeah. I think that the karma was a huge failure, but I just, now that they're up for sale, how do you go from our drone program is a failure to

we're selling the whole company? Right? Like, what is that? Why, is GoPro a failing company? Because they're not making the billions of dollars they made in 2013, 2014. Yeah. So we'll see. I mean, I think that that's like outside of CS news,

but it's by far the biggest news of the day. Yeah. Yeah. Company that was kind of on the cutting edge, they thought they were going to be a software company for a minute. We're just going to see what happens to GoPro. But there's also news at CS. So my conception of CES is that it is a show about new TVs.

Yeah, because that is the thing you see everywhere. You can't ignore them. They're literally everywhere. There's already been a bunch of TV news here at the show. Samsung had its event, LG had its event, all their companies are having their events. Samsung's news is kind of nuts. They've unveiled what I kind of don't believe is a modular TV called The Wall. It can be up to 146 inches.

You know, they've got image quality claims that they get blacker than LG's. Yeah, so the way they use LCD, LED instead of OLED, but it still can turn them off. And then you can have all these little squares and you can build the TV size that you want. But they're saying it's a concept right now, but they are promising more information in the spring. So I have like two questions. One, who is going to want to buy like a little stack of bricks and then like assemble a TV? Yeah, it's probably new TV. So two people.

Nailed it. And then how are they going to manage it? like aspect ratios and image sizes and control. Well, they actually be able to get these things to talk to each other. If the thing is off, you can see the lines between the little modules, but if it's on, supposedly, you can't. Our reporter, Chris Welch was at the dental last time.

There are many, many things that could go wrong with this. So, and then obviously they have their regular TVs. Yeah. I always say Samsung's TVs last year, they're expensive, new TVs. We're pretty disappointing. The TVs this year don't really fix it. They're still edge-lit LCDs. So we'll see.

And then LG, obviously, Samsung's a big competitor, has their own concept, which is a rollable... It rolls up... Yeah, so it's like a big soundbar-looking thing, and then a TV rolls out of it. It's a 65-inch OLED, and it rolls away. That's amazing. That's everyone's dream.

Every year, LG's like, a little... Another thing rolls. But to me, the more interesting thing with LG is they sort of... They had their big splashy OLED stuff last year. They had the wallpaper TV, blah, blah, blah. So this year, their main TV

that they actually are saw in the consumers seem a little bit more boring, but to me, it's like the second year of a... brand new car. You let them work out the kinks in the first generation. You get the second year, you get slightly higher quality stuff, slightly more reliable stuff.

But here, so the specs and the new TVs you can buy, the 2018 OLEDs. Yeah. They still run WebOS, which is hilarious. And they now have Google Assistant and Alexa on top of WebOS. Right. Which is fascinating because why not just make them run Android like everybody else? LGs all in on WebOS. Here's what I would say.

I own a 2016 LG OLED. Yep. It runs RobOS. It's great TV. It looks great. I would not trust LG to update that software ever. Ever. Once they ship it, it shipped, and that's the end of it.

I think that's the biggest problem with having a smart TV. Yeah. And it's the problem that no one that CS has ever solved. Remember Samsung used to sell little modules that you were supposed to swap out? I got sued because they didn't do that. So here are big new TVs. TCL updated its TV today, all kinds of stuff. There's also a bunch of car stuff.

So CS has become a car show. All of North Hall, every major carmaker is here. Mercedes is running cars around town and say the ultimate mobile device. Yeah, and they've got the, like, camouflage on them so you can't tell they are. The cars. Is a car a gadget? No. You just said yes, Dieter, right?

Yeah, did. And you sighed. Absolutely do not. I think gadgets are things that, like, you are able to upgrade over time, right? Like, it's a gadget in the sense it's like this, like, utility thing, but it's not, it doesn't, you just have one forever. What's undeniable to me is look at the, you. the concept that got announced today by a Chinese company, the Bighton, the concept electric vehicle.

It's just got a giant screen. There's no way this thing actually ships. But, like, as a gadget, it's like, you get in, and they're promising, like, content, and it'll, like, track your heartbeat while you're sitting there just in case and, like, all this stuff. And the Bighton thing is, so, I mean, that company's not working on. They had a big event last night.

Like, the CEO brought his kids out. His daughter was like, I love this car. It's really cool. Great. but the seats rotate. And then it's like they've got media partnerships and it's like huge screens. They're claiming they're going to be able to get Alexa

to do better things in the car than regular Alexa. It sounds to me like a car is a gadget. I look at those and think, what happens when this is old? What happens when the storage slows down? What happens when a touchscreen gets wonky? Like you don't want all the problems that gadgets have in your car.

And the only company that's like managed deal with it well as Tesla. And even Tesla has these like notorious reliability problems. So like the idea of the car as a gadget, everyone wants, everyone wants a little bit of that shine. Well, everyone wants in there. So Nvidia announced a partnership with like Uber and

VW and there and they're fighting now with Intel. And so this this like autonomous car battle is moving into the next phase of all of these different companies, Waymo and Lyft and whoever, they're all like forming these little like partnerships and to like have fights. Yeah, you can see where the

battle lines are. Yeah. I think that's actually the gadget to me is something that you own, but the future of these cars is you push the button and a robot shows up and you sit in it and like screw with your own phone instead of dealing with Uber's deal with Fendango to show you movie trailers. Like that's just hell. Like that's just the my conception of hell. We talked about just a couple of like super gadgety gadgets. My favorite probably so far is the planet computer's Gemini. Oh yeah. Jumped ahead to that. It's a tiny little Android device. It's a flip-up screen.

It's got a flip-up screen. It's got a media tech processor or whatever. But it has a keyboard keyboard, like the old Sions. Like you're supposed to type on it. It's not a thumbboard. It's like they're like actual keys. This just makes my heart happy, even though I know it will be a garbage device. I'm definitely like, instead of a laptop, I'm like, put it away.

That sounds amazing. There's a bunch of other insane gadgets. There's a product called Li-Fi, which beams internet to your laptop using infrared light. The goal is so that all the lights in your house or wherever will have Li-Fi devices in them. You can just set your laptop down and get it. It's more secure than Wi-Fi or something. Yeah, because it only hits where the light hits, so it's line to sight. Yeah.

The problem is that the demo, the first product, this is true, it costs $840. It is a lamp to make the Li-Fi Wi-Fi lamp go. work, you need to plug a dongle into your computer, and the lamp gets internet-hects through Ethernet, and it has to be line-of-sight. So you pretend this is the lamp, and this is the laptop, you plug Ethernet into the lamp, and then you shine the lamp at the laptop,

and you plug a dongle into the laptop, and that's how you get there. Instead of just doing one of these, I don't know about that. And what does that cost? $840 for one user. It does not support two dongles at once. Is it fast internet?

It maxes out of 23. Megstone. Okay. Yeah, moving on. It's fun. Also, on the same tip, hilariously for years now, over a decade now, our most popular stories at CES have been about routers. Roders that look like evil monster spiders.

So mesh router is a big thing. Linus has a new VLOP, but they've also made a new router LYNCIS that specifically designed to make your Xbox one go faster. All it is is is Browder prioritization. It's like the killer prioritization tech, but it just is like, oh, that's an Xbox. That's an Xbox. I'm going to make sure it has a faster connection. Yeah. Net neutrality is dead everyone. Oh, my God.

Inside your home and in the world. And then lastly, I think, Deere, this is a story of the show. You already wrote about this a little bit. A little bit. Yeah, we haven't seen a ton of announcements yet about this, but Google has a massive, giant booth out in the parking lot outside the convention center. It says, hey, Google. We are expecting to see a lot of Google assistant devices.

We've seen some. We've seen a few speakers, a bunch of companies announcing support. And so I think the story of the show is going to be Google versus Alexa, who can get more people on board. Google really doesn't want Alexa to run away with us. And we're going to be talking about that all week. So we've got a question from Josh. Any must-have smart products that integrate Google system that you've seen yet? I mean, get the speaker, so you've got it.

That's the main thing. To me, honestly, I thought smart light bulbs are kind of dumb. I was like, whatever, I got a light switch, but I finally got some. Yeah. It supports a whole bunch of them, so just get whatever you want to get. I'm using Hugh. They're great. Just get a handful. And the switch thing is a little bit awkward, but to be able, like, I was out of town

over Christmas, and I just, like, programmed in the lights to turn on off, and I was gone, didn't have to worry about it, and then, you know, lights turned out of my apartment, so it looked like I was home. It was great. I think that there are these, like, little beachheads of smart kind of. Yeah. You get it, and you set up, okay, now I'm doing my music this way. The next one, usually for most people is lights. The next one after that, like, maybe you'll get the harmony thing into your TV.

For Google Assistant specifically, though, the number one thing is get a Chromecast, because then you can ask it to play stuff on your TV. Yeah. I will say there's a bunch of new products here that have assistance built into them. So first, this is ridiculous. First alert has smoke detector that has microphones and the light in it.

You can get Alexa version or Google version. Also Airplay, too, for some reason? Please do not airplay to your smoke detector. Just don't. Like, let it detect smoke. You can listen to fucking bops somewhere else I've finished for you. But the idea of where the microphone should go is really interesting.

I Devices has a new smart light switch that is not just controlled by Alexa. It is an Alexa device. So it has the blue light ring. You can say Alexa, the light switch lights up. So I think a big question right now, you've got obviously the Amazon, Google, first-party hardware. One's aware of it. But they're going far and wide. They're letting people put this stuff everywhere.

I think the question of where the microphones are going to go, it started being asked last year. Yeah. And now we're seeing all kinds of products with microphones in them to access these devices. I think Google and Amazon are still going to keep selling Google Home Minis and Alexa, or Echo devices. Google said they already sold like 6 million. Google Home Mini's, some huge number. I think people want one. I don't think people want microphones built into their walls.

I think they want to unplug that shit sometimes. Yeah. So we'll see. And then there's smart fridges, thin queue. It's not LG's ThinQ. It's got stuff. It's running WebOS. Great.

Samsung has a Bixby fridge. What is Bixby? It's like they wanted it to not be the same thing as Siri and Alexa and Google Assistant, but it's turning into that. And it has a smart thing sub in it. So Samsung has more of the ecosystem built out. Belkin is here. Apple, it's funny. The biggest Apple HomeKit news is from Belkin.

Right. They actually have a proper hub. Yeah. So you can use your Wimo stuff with HomeKit now. And then, Deuter, this is your favorite. Oh, my God. There's this thing called the nanoleaf. It looks like a 12-sided dye, like if you play Dungeons and Dragons.

And you just rotate it and set it down on the scene that you want. But I just love the idea that you get home and you're like, what I want my house to be like right now? What color should the lights be? Roll the dice! I mean, is it funny? It's ridiculous. 12-sided dice.

We got a question here for Max. What do you make of Alexa on Windows 10 PCs? We're starting to see this happen. Yeah, I think it's really early. I think the initial version is just an app and it's not fully integrated into the computer. but we know that Cortana and Alexa are starting to talk to each other. Microsoft and Amazon have a partnership. And so fine, it's on laptops.

I'm like, oh my God, this is huge news. I was like, nah, not really. I think down the line as they talk to each other more, and you can just ask for what you want and the computer figures out whether it's Alexa or Cortano that does it, that will be very, very interesting. Yeah, and I think the idea of Alexa going everywhere, Amazon's pushing that very hard.

I think getting it onto the PC, they're going to have to figure out how to get it. get around the phones. Yeah. You see a lot of, there's a ton of Alexa for the car products, and a problem is Alexa still can't do anything that you want to do in a car. They can't pull up a map. It can't do GPS.

It can't make a phone call. I can't send a text message. So I think these other assistants that are connected to those things, those kind of partnerships become really interesting. Right now it's just an app on a handful of PC vendors have announced support for it. What is the incentive there for Microsoft to allow infiltration of a competitor, right? Microsoft doesn't allow anything. Well, no, but the...

If Alexa is on Windows 10 PCs, they have Cortana built in, right? Well, so first of all, they have the partnership. Right, so what, I'm saying, what is the benefit of that partnership? Why is that... Oh, Alexa's so much further ahead than Cortana right now, that doesn't make sense. So Microsoft is saying your product is better, we'll put it on our hardware. Well, plus, it's also like, there's a possible future where, like, Alexa becomes a more important than Platform than Windows, and Microsoft certainly doesn't want that.

So if they're partnered up, then Windows continues to be an important platform with Alexa dependent on it. Also, I think both companies are in Seattle. Yeah, they're just... They're just hanging out. They just hanging out and having it with each other, yeah. But like, I mean, you know, this is like, there's this like dominant force in mobile with Apple.

Yeah. And like, you can make this partnership and, like, come at it with a bunch of like... So they're kind of teaming up. I think so. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. Hey, it's Ashley Carmen, co-host of Why Do You Push That Button.

Here live from PEPCOM at CES. It is 8pm. It's happening. We're tired. We're hungry. Got gadgets. My beat this year at CES has been beauty gadgets, which I very much enjoy and I want to test more of.

So last year I saw a lot of smart mirrors and skin analyzers built into those smart mirrors. This year I'm actually seeing, I've seen alternative gadgets that also do analyses of you and give you suggestions on products to use, but this time they're not necessarily limited to mirrors. But the overall take is that all these beauty companies. companies are just trying to use gadgets to sell their products, which is like fine. Like the beauty industry naturally wants to sell you more stuff and that's what it does. But it's bringing gadgets into the mix.

And I think that's kind of interesting. I think it speaks to a changing demographic. Like maybe they're trying to get to younger people who are more interested or anything that can promise to make you look better through technology. You're like inherently probably a little more interested. My name is Sam Bifid. I'm an editor based in Tokyo. And a thing I've seen a lot of this week at CES 2018 is a thing that I was kind of looking for.

A lot of monitors. And I feel like I'm more into monitors than most people. I sort of have a thing for them. But I've seen two in particular that are kind of like my dream product in two different categories. One, LG made this 5K ultra-wide monitor with Thunderbolt 3, which is the kind of thing that I just really want on my desk at home. It would up my productivity game a lot.

Well, I don't know, I probably wouldn't. I would just look at the same things, put more of them at once, but I really want it. It would charge my MacBook at the same time as putting the image on the screen. It would dominate my desk, and it would be amazing. Earlier this morning, I saw something in the total opposite direction.

It's more of a hardware platform than a specific monitor, but NVIDA announced this thing called the Big Format Gaming Display, or BFGD. It's a sort of platform for manufacturers to make their own 65-inch 4K HDR gaming displays. And they're not really TVs, but they're kind of like TVs and gaming monitors all in one. and they work with G-Sync, which is like my favorite thing in the world.

It's the thing that syncs your GPU output to the frame rate of the monitor, so you have the super smooth, realistic output and games feel like natural, and it's difficult to explain without seeing it, but it's amazing. I have a G-Sync monitor at home. It's my favorite thing on my desk, and this is a way to bring that to your living room. And it will probably cost several thousand dollars, and I will never ever own one, but I will lust for it as long as it exists. This episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Audible.

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So that's audible.com slash verge or text Verge to 500-500 for your 30-day trial and your first audiobook free. at Audible. Yesterday was the biggest newsday of CES, and we kind of know what's going on. So, Deere, what's happening? Yeah, well, we promised that there would be a bunch of Google Assistant news, and good Lord did we deliver. There was just a ton of it.

So we already mentioned the new Smart Display Platform, so Google Assistant will work on smart speakers with screens. There's a whole bunch of nitty-gritty details, which you're going to get into, but there's one from Lenovo. Actually, there's two from Lenovo. JBL promise they're going to bring one Sony promise they're going to bring one

L-G somebody else L-G Yeah it's got a carbon interface And of course it supports YouTube Sorry Amazon Well I think this is like the next big front Yeah so we're going to bring on the Lenovo one we're going to talk about this whole thing Speaking of Google so it's Las Vegas and it

has been raining and it's I know it's boring to talk about the weather but good lord This city does not understand how to deal with It's a disaster The streets are flooded So Google had created this gigantic monster booth out in the parking lot of CES, and they had to shut it down for the day

because it was too dangerous, because they had big light-up screens, and they had a slide that was outdoors, and they were going to have electronics outside, and there's a car, and who knows what else. And because it was pouring down rain, they shut it down for the day to make sure everything was hardened against the moisture,

just like a pixel one. I feel like last night. Wow. When it's rain. Come on. It's a good pixel one, Joe. It was a great pixel one. It's such a soft spot.

It was like a great five weeks in my life. Yeah. Google Assistant also coming to Android Auto, which is really just like a rebrand. Yeah, so you can talk to Android Auto now, but now you get the poodle, the little dots, which... It's not a poodle. It's totally a poodle. It's not a poodle.

But, like, you can do a little bit more Google Assistant stuff on it, but it's basically the same. Yeah. But the partnerships that are getting on top of that standard Android Auto thing is crazy. There's a bunch of car companies that are announcing that they're integrated. There's new decks that you can get. Yeah, new head units. New head units. My favorite one is the Sony one.

It's got almost like a seven-inch capacitive display this year, so it's proper capacitive. And what's really cool about it, you know, it supports CarPlay, and I think it supports Android Auto. It also, it's a double din, so it's double tall, but the thing that actually goes into your car is just a single height din. So you don't have to fuss around with much getting all the adapters and cables and stuff. cable just sort of like fit in the top. You know, it's ready for rear cameras and all of that stuff. This is great, because no modern car can accept a new stereo. So Sony's last head unit was $400.

I'm sure this one will probably end up being about the same price. And it makes me furious. Really? Because you used to be able to put a new stereo in your car. Now you can't anymore because they're all whatever. Yeah. But back when you could, getting a car stereo this good with a touchscreen and all the features and maps and whatever was like $1,200. I bought that.

And now it's insane. Yeah. And now there are incredibly. good, elegant, decent head units that are easier to install than ever before, and you just can't put them in your car, unless you've got like a Civic from 1996, you're out of a lot. My car, I have a Chrysler car, and the controls for the heated seats. Built in the touchscreen, so I can just never get anything else.

I know, Google partnered with Kia, Google Assistant's coming to that. Panasonic has got a bunch of Googles and stuff. High Sense is putting it in their TVs. So this is like last year, everything was Alexa. And this year everything is Google. My favorite one, I think, is probably Phillips has a kitchen TV. It's a 24-inch Android TV. What?

Yeah. It's a, you know, the display that sits on top of a speaker. So it looks like a TV just sitting on a concrete block. I like it. Yeah, it's cute. It's a neat little gadget thing. I feel like that what screen goes in the kitchen is like a big theme of the CES. Oh, for sure.

Is the slinovo thing? Is that TV? Is it just, you know, about a 37-inch TV above your stove? Yep. That's all out there. Kiltch. How do you pronounce this? Clipsch? Whatever. These notes are incredible.

Mid-century modern speakers. No, they've got copper knobs and buttons, and they've got, like, wood paneling. They look great. They're just, like, big, you know, grandpa speakers. I have a pair of big grandpa-clips speakers. Yeah. They're great. I don't need all the... Anyway.

It's great. Everything has Google Assistant. JBL, Sony. Sony's updating all their old headphones. Just a ton of Google Assistant stuff. Yeah. Then, this is my favorite one. Okay.

There's a pet feeder. It's one of those robots. Why not? It's like the oldest gadget in the world, the timer just opens to feed your pet. And now your pet can be like, okay, Google, dog, this is what we'll teach dogs to talk.

Yes. They will be able to say, okay, Google. They're incentivized. They finally have a reason. It's going to be great. So it's everywhere, basically. Other thing that's everywhere, if you are a company at CES

and you are not releasing truly wireless earbuds, get out. Yeah. Everybody has proper wireless earbis. Okay, so you're an earbuds stand. AirPods. AirPods. You love Airbud.

The dog, it's a close. I got dogs in the brain. But no, you're like, you're like AirPods are just the winner, right? For if you're an iPhone user without a headphone, Jack, yeah. Yeah. It offers a level of convenience that I think it's pretty much unmatched. You open them, connect them, you don't have to go into settings ever. So everyone's building products like this.

I think it's important to note, there are a lot of iPhone owners out there. You can use AirPods with an Android phone. Yep, you do it. I do it. It's not as good of an experience. But Andrew has more market. share, Android phones, unfortunately also losing their headphone jack. There's a big market for a one true wireless earbuds company to come in and capture that Android market share and what Apple's not going to do.

And so what those companies are doing is they're solving the problems that they can. So, for example, Qualcomm has a brand new chip for wireless earbuds. It's got, you know, longer battery life, less power consumption. It supports noise canceling natively. And it also, it's going to have, quote, more battery life than, quote, the most popular true wireless headset. I wonder what they're talking about. I wonder what company they're in a lawsuit

which, they ate. Oh, wow, yeah. So they're solving, yeah. Those are, headsets based on that are coming out later this year. So they're starting to solve the battery life problem and some of the features problem, a bunch of the stuff, you know, support Google Assistant

and noise cancelling and all that stuff. But they haven't been able to solve the actual problem, which is the connection. The connection. Is Bluetooth 5 coming? Is it going to be good enough? Is it going to, is App Dex support? Is it going to be as easy to pair as a pair of AirPods are?

Yeah. So this thing that Qualcomm's announcing, it actually has 120 megahertz processors. Why not? No, but this is the thing. We're saying it's under the radar a little bit, but it's a thing that's happening. All the wireless chips are starting to get processors in them. Right. So control that wireless connection better and make it more stable.

This is a thing like Arm says it to you, the Bluetooth people say to you. Yeah. That's the thing, you know, Apple is able to do that very quickly. With the W1, right? With the W1. W1 has a little processor. Apple's integrated, but that idea very quickly gets commodified.

So you're going to see people catch up fast. A bunch of the new headphones, not truly wireless yet, but a bunch of the new headphones that support Google Assistant, they haven't named the chip, but they talk about the special circuitry that allows them to, as soon as you start talking, it starts sending the message down to Google. And that's like an audio buffer up.

So there's the Ashley Chloe earbuds. There's a bunch of earbuds, but maybe some tweets here before we get into too many of these little guys. Yeah, so here's a good question from JP. how much of Alexa News from last year's CS actually came to market. And now there's Google Assistant News everywhere in school, but I'm worried it's all hype right now. It's a lot of hype.

It's funny because I think Google's actually been a little better position. Like, nothing came out from last year's Alexa News. When did Lenovo's speaker? Alexa Speaker finally come out. I thought Lenovo's speaker. Like, that was the big news. Lenovo made their own, it was supposed to have better audio. It basically never came out.

I think Amazon beat them to market with their own second generation products. This is not good. I think that was a big wave of people learning how to make this stuff. Like, how do we make a thing with microphones and lights and a cloud connection? Like, a lot of these companies have never really done it before. Now they've figured it all out, and it's just a different SDK, it's what Google Assistant in it. Right. Obviously some other details, but like that core work.

Like the money that Google pays them to make those speakers instead of Alexa speakers. Yeah, exactly. It's a different business deal and a little bit of different work. But the fundamental question of what, how do we get microphones on our product? That engineering is starting to get figured out. So I think Google, you're going to see the Google stuff faster because they've already done the work to put the Alexa stuff. And theoretically, if it stays competitive, if Google can stay as competitive with Alexa and getting products out, it couldn't end up being like an actual quality battle, not just

on what questions the Assistant can answer, but also my hunch is that for the time being and for the foreseeable future, Google is going to be better with crappier microphones than Alexa. I've used a bunch of third-party Alexa speakers, and if they have bad microphones, it is a horrible experience. But Google only needs two, and they're better at, you know, computer, machine, learning hear you stuff. And so it may be that they'll do better with third party

with crappy microphones than Alexa. We'll see. I still think it, ultimately all this stuff is really interesting. The car stuff in particular, right? Yeah. I actually know a lot of people with echo dots in their car, which is really funny. A car?

Yeah. If you have a car with Wi-Fi or you just don't mind tethering your phone, people just plug an echo dot in the car. And what are they, what kind of commands are they parking at their echo dot in the car? They're just like turning the lights. Yeah, you turn the lights.

Played Spotify. It's paired to Bluetooth. Yeah. So this is one of the reasons, Assistant in Android Auto is interesting, is you can turn on your lights and your home, whatever. But also, all of your preferences and defaults from Google Assistant now work in Android Auto. So if you told Google Assistant, I'd listen up to music on Spotify, and I play news with this. And I have this routine.

Every time I get in my car, I'm going to say, hey, Google, I'm in my car. And you're going to read me the news, and then you're going to turn off my lights, and then you're going to play Spotify. That's potentially interesting. I still think, though, that when you think of these smart home device assistants, it's the Echo Lines. of products and it's the Google Home line of products and like we've already went an entire year from last CES and I don't yeah I can't think of anyone that's like oh there's this smart speaker and this one and then like they name five others it's Alexa like the echo dot or show or whatever the tall echo and then the Google home the Poc the regular one or like is there who's going to be the third or fourth manufacturer so here's a question right is Apple too late to just join this game it's gonna be Apple dot yeah It's like obviously Apple put up the home on. It's so expensive, though. $400.

$400? No, it's $3.49. It's expensive. You could get the little donut puck from Google for $50. Yeah, you get them both. You got the home pod and I pick up this other thing. You think it's going to be Apple? Yeah.

Like Facebook, I think the rumor about the Facebook one came out today. It's like $500. Club Portal. I'm leaving. That's it. We broke Santa. One last pair of wireless earbuds there. Sony has these open ear headphones.

They look a little hearing. 80, but they've got this incredible way that they fit in your ear, so it's open, but you can still hear it like an earbud. And then they have microphones for letting in ambient noise if you want to. So you can have, basically, music playing constantly, but you can still hear the world around you pretty well, and they're truly wireless earbuds. They're interesting. Yeah. Yeah. They're just gadgety and nerd. I think we should point out that Will I.M. made news here because he bought a wireless earbuds startup called Irin, which is... If your company's getting saved by Will I.M. Goodbye, Erin. What are you doing? It was nice to see you.

Oh, wow. And there's a bunch of VR stuff. Yeah, so we already talked about, or we're going to talk about later, the HCC Vive Pro. Oculus Go, sort of came out that it's getting manufactured by Xiaomi. In sense. And Hugo Barra is the one who said, hey, we're making this thing, and we're also making a version of it for China. But it's not here at CES. They're not demoing it here at CES, is my understanding.

Yep, and it runs on a Snapdragon 821 processor. It's going to be $200 coming out later. Yeah. They basically just, like, collapse the gear VR. Yeah. Like, they put a phone in the thing, right? Yeah. That seems about right. Yeah. It's funny because Hugo Barra was like, he was that Johnny.

He's that Johnny. He's a joby. Yeah, it's funny. There's some AR glasses. Air glasses are sort of everywhere. I think the AR definition is real fuzzy here. They're like, anything that you can see. It's like, what about the augmenting of the reality? Yeah. Not too many of them are actually augmenting the other, but there are so many garbage, like put a screen in front of your eye displays here.

It's out of control. There's one that's actually pretty good that Nick Statt tried out. called the Vuzix Blade. And I was very skeptical, because Vuzix has been coming to CES and putting a screen in front of your eyeball for at least five years. Just every year it's like, all right, what do you got this year?

And this year, they have these things that, like, look techie, but not, like, wildly insane Google Glass techie. And they put a big display over your right eye, and you can actually move it up and down in your field of view. You can control the touchpad if you want, but it has, guess what, Alexa. Of course. Of course.

Yeah. We got one question here, I actually think it's really interesting. Now that Automakers, they're just putting Google system in the cars, this Android Auto dead. So this is actually, I don't know, I don't know if this is yes or no. But what is interesting is automakers have always hated carplayed Android Auto. They don't like it. Because it gives Apple and Google control of that interface, and they want you to be in their interface.

That's a thing that they want. So they've been doing it begrudgingly. That's why you see it's come out slowly. That's why, for example, Toyota just doesn't support it. They're going to put you in their interface. And so it's like, well, we sell all of the cameras in the world. We don't have to deal with this. I think once you start integrating Google Assistant,

now that asks the question, like, should Google Assistant be able to turn on your seat warmers? Should it be able to adjust your climate control. It should. So like that battle line is starting to shift a little bit. In the same way you want to say, use your voice turning your lights, you want to use your voice to change the heat. So the last piece of news we should probably talk about is

Intel had its major keynote last night. We saw the Volocopter, the crazy drone helicopter thing, take off on stage. They announced that they were actually keeping their promise to ship the quantum computing chip to researchers. No, the numeric chip to researchers, they hit 49 cubits, which is close to this thing called quantum supremacy, which is when quantum computers are actually practically more capable than current standard processors, so they're getting close. Yeah. And researchers just hacking on quantum computers. They also made tiny little drones that can fly around indoors without GPS and they flew a hundred of them.

So you got to go backstage before this keynote. We should talk about this thing that happened because you were invited backstage. And this is true. Dieter was supposed to interview the CEO of Intel. I was. So all this was arranged. And then the meltdown inspector news happened. And they didn't like immediately say you're not.

But it was like a rolling like, and then it was like, no, you're not going to be able to interview the CEO. Especially because now he's like under some like scrutiny. sold the bunch of stop before the meltdown news came out. So you saw him. Yeah, so what happened was, you know, we're there, we're behind the scenes to get early photos and to, like, talk to the production staff and all the stuff and, like, see the crazy light show early. And it is a crazy light show.

And I go on stage, and he's there. And I'm like, oh, now's my chance to go talk to him. But I was doing a stand-up. He photo-bombed me while I was doing the video, and I had no idea, right? And so it just happened. And so then people laugh. I'm like, oh, oh, this just happened to me. Okay.

So I go over and I'm going to try and talk to him, but he's surrounded by staff. He doesn't want to talk to me. But I'm like, well, okay, at least give me a selfie. We get the selfie. And I'm like, uh, and then he, you know, they had to start the rehearsal, so they shuffled me away. So I didn't get a chance to do the, like, 2020, like, jump on you. What answer the question thing? Which I wanted to do, but couldn't.

Yeah. I like the impression in 2020 is jumping on people and asking the questions. Well, what's the guy with the mustache that back in the 80s that used to do all the time? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's notcile. Yeah.

Anyway. But seeing the keynote early and seeing how they put it together in the background is fascinating. And we've got a whole video about it. You're looking at some of it here. What's interesting about Intel, and we were talking about this all week, is Intel wants you to care about Intel. But you don't buy stuff directly from Intel. You buy stuff from Apple, which has Intel. You buy stuff from Microsoft or whomever.

And so Intel has to create a story that tells you why you care about. at Intel and actually gets you to directly get something from Intel. So they started with all these sports experiences. Because if you're having a sports experience, you're watching football from the perspective of the quarterback or, I don't know, a movie experience where you've got volumetric video and you can look at a scene, whatever. You can go directly to like intel.com to get that experience. And so they try to tell that story, but they also tried to tell like five other stories,

and they ended up kind of telling a confusing lesson story. And you still kind of don't buy anything from Intel. Yeah. Right? At the end of the day, you're watching football, you're like, Intel's great. Yeah. But, like, you haven't purchased anything. You're still just buying a football package.

Yeah, yeah. By the way, watch that whole video. Go to vert.com, get our YouTube channel. Yeah. It's all there. Deeter, spend a lot of time behind the scenes. You can watch the CEO of Intel photo bomb Dieter. Do stuff.

Do stuff. I'm Dami. I'm a social media manager slash aspiring reporter. This is my first CES reporting on things that I've seen. So far, I saw. two laundry folding robots, one of which was significantly cooler and more expensive than the other one, because it uses artificial intelligence to analyze what it's exactly looking at. Oh, tomorrow I'm going to fight a ping pong robot, so I'm really looking forward to that.

And then right after that, I'm going to fight a Scrabble playing robot, so I'm looking forward to that. And then I'm going to look for more robots I can physically fight. Hey, this is Danny Deal reporter on all things DJ gear related and other weird audio products. So that is the type of thing that I was looking for at CES. And I thought there might be a few things, but not so many because sometimes the audio stuff gets relegated to other trade shows. But surprisingly, there were a few standout products that were really revolutionary, and I thought could actually be very helpful for musicians. In particular, there was a MIDI ring that you would wear in conjunction while you're playing a keyboard that could actually add effects on the musicians. the fly such as vibrato or pitch bend or low pass filters and it connects with a daw on your computer

such as Ableton or Logic and can record all of that automation. And there was another piece of gear from Isotope called the Spire Studio and Isotope is really known more for their software. And this is the first piece of hardware that they've created. It's a little puck and it's basically an all in one recording studio that you can put in your backpack with you and record multiple tracks of audio on the fly. It's got a microphone in the front. It's got a couple of jacks for headphones, a couple of dual jacks on the back for plugging in instruments or XLR cables. And it does a lot of things for you like automatically checking your input levels to make sure that you're not too hot or clipping. So those were the types of things that I saw that really actually solve problems that

musicians have in terms of doing what they want to do on the road, on the fly, or expanding the capabilities of the instruments that they already have. This episode of The Vergecast is also brought to you by ZipRecruiter. A fresh new year has begun, and if you're setting new goals for your business, it's extremely difficult to reach them without the right people on your team. And ZipRecruiter has transformed how you go about finding those people. ZipRecruiter posts your job to over 100 of the web's leading job boards with just one click. Then ZipRecruiter actively looks for the most qualified candidates and invites them to apply.

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That's right, free. Just go to ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. That's ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. One more time, try for free. Go to ZipRecruiter.com slash verge. T.S. is still going. A ton of news. Regardless of the power and flooding situations.

Yeah, and so we try to hit all major categories, but I want to talk about something that didn't make a huge splash. I want to talk a little bit about smartwatches. Yeah. Because there were a handful, and the most interesting ones were not Androidware, because nothing is interesting in Androidware. Hey.

Sorry. But so there was this Blocks modular smartwatch. It was here at the show. They had a Kickstarter, and they were delayed, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's a smart watch running a proprietary thing, but it was interesting because it's modular. Yeah. So the smart watch itself is like 260 bucks,

and then you can buy these little $35 block. that like attach to the band, like in between the watch and the band, and it gives you, like, extra sensors or, like, a button to do a thing. Is modularity... Everyone's trying it. They're just like, well, it didn't work on phones. Yeah.

Modl's still going for it. They've got a keyboard. It's true. There's a Moto mod keyboard now. You're that person. I don't think modularity on watches is a thing. Yeah. Like, it's whatever. But there are other... So there's a Power Watch X. It's a smart watch that is powered by your body heat.

It's been out for a while. they made a new version and this version is a full proper hybrid smart watch yeah which means that it can get notifications and show some stuff that's cool and you never have to charge it because as long as you're warm blooded no okay so the notifications are like you know it's a screen it's like one of those weird low power yeah yeah um and then there's also the uh my chrono so they made a smaller version of their smart watch that does have a screen and it's a screen underneath the physical dials yeah which has sort of been everybody's dream but I don't know, you're looking at it here, and you're like, man, if they could just do that, it'd be perfect.

And then you look at it, you're like, maybe I don't want that. Yeah, I don't want that at all, actually. That seems not the right move. Yeah, but it's, you know, it's 200 bucks. Battery life should last about three days for the screen, about a month for just the hands. It's running a proprietary operating system, which I would get very angry about. But, again, I repeat, not a fan of Android Wear the past few months. Yeah, Android Wear, it's funny.

Just in the Vegas airport, you know, Michael Coors is like the core. Quartz connect, like they're doing the ads, it's like fashion stuff. Like Kate Spade announced a watch with the show. Yep, that's 325 if you get it with a metal bracelet. It's just straightforward Androidware. I don't think it looks that good personally. But it's interesting. If you think about like the SmartWatch OS is like the movement of regular watch,

all the fashion companies are like, screw at Android Wear, we'll let Google take care of the platform. And we'll just continue to do what we do, which is like make pretty bands and cases. Yeah. The best looking one is this Skagen, Skagin, Skagin? It's 275. I think this looks pretty good. And this, again, is straight Android wear.

It's like the pebble time round. Yeah, except it's a full LCD. Don't. Hey, but it's actually no flat tire. Yeah. Skagin looks out and doing Moto. Yeah, well, that's not. Motos out of the game.

Yeah, I don't know. But the most interesting watches to me are the full proper hybrid smart watches. So that's what I wear. I've got a fossil Q hybrid, but Misfit came out with a new hybrid watch. What is your Q? Oh, here. Put it on this camera here. You can hit a button and it'll, like, the dial will turn and show my steps,

or I can hit a button, and the dial automatically turns around to show the date. Those are physical dials? Yeah, they're physical dials. And then when I get a notification, I program each of the apps that I get notifications from to a different number. So nine is the calendar. So when a notification comes into my phone, I can glance at my watch. We're like, oh, it's a text message. I should look at it.

Or you just get super confused, and you're like, wait, it's not 9 o'clock. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, it moves back. Anyway, Misfit has one of these now. It is 150 bucks, so it's pretty cheap, and it does measure your heart rate, which a lot of these little hybrid watches don't. And the batteries on them usually last, like, a good, anywhere from like a month to six months. Oh, that's great. And you can just replace the battery.

The other, like, sleeper hit in the smartwatch world is Garmin. Lauren Goode is going to be on later. She actually went out and bought a Garmin smart watch because they're actually pretty great. The new Garmin here is a 645, and it lets you store music. and it's basically like an old school iPod because the way that it stores music is you get 500 songs. And it works with Iheart Radio and D.SER. Of course.

Womp, womp, womp. But it's relatively inexpensive for a smart watch and the battery life just goes on forever because it uses this particular kind of screen that looks kind of bad indoors, but you can see it just fine in the sunlight. So I think that until, something more interesting happens with Android Wear.

And I think that more interesting thing is make better looking watches that are smaller. That all the action, at least for Android users, is looking at these other types of smart watches and just get something that looks good to you and you'll get a couple extra features with it. But don't try and go full, like, don't try and compete with the Apple Watch right now

if you got an Android phone because you're really not going to get there. You know, the Garmin thing is interesting. Our science editor, Liz Zapato has been, you know, screwing on with Apple Watch a little bit because of all their health and fitness claims. And she told me, she didn't take it on a hiking trip because she looked at it and was like,

this was made for indoor kids. And she took her Garmin Watch, which seemed a lot tougher, more easily and had the longer battery life for kind of a long trip off the grid there. So, I mean, it's interesting. It's like we keep seeing them. They keep happening. Sam, what do you think?

Sam. Yeah, it's Sam at all. Whoa. Oh, hey. You're not Sam. Hey, guys. It's Scott Rogaski from ASCET Trivia on the tweets right now. Yeah, I'm just tweeting from Sam's account here.

Where is the nearest trip club? Send. Yeah, you're in Vegas. Yeah. There's one, I think, down the hall. Scott, what are you doing here, buddy? I am, you know, I was cruising around, Southern Nevada. Yeah.

And I heard about the CES thing. It was like Woodstock for tech people. Yeah, yeah. Thought I'd come by. No, I'm here. Super Deluxe brought me out to do some work for them, an OMD. I'm doing a live stream from the floor each day. Oh, very cool.

Yeah. So are you doing, are you hosting H. No, this is not H-DUXQ? No. This is not HQ related. Oh, cool. Yeah. So what are you seeing at C.S?

What are you looking? I'm seeing a lot of long lines for the men's room. Yeah. Which is unusual. Because I'm used to, you know, it's the ladies have the long lines. And here it's dude heavy. Yeah.

We have a lot of women on our staff and they point out, like, at least we get to go to the end. It's like equal opportunity now. Yeah, that's pretty good. But I'm seeing, you know, I'm like, I saw a guy with a sword today that makes light up noises and sounds. Yeah. A lot of pointless things is what I'm trying to say.

I don't know how much. of the stuff is actually useful. Yeah. But maybe, I mean, you're talking about the Garmin watches and everything, and I guess there are some application. I mean, these drones. Yeah, a lot of drones. Yeah. So have you been in the conventional?

You've been looking at the stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've been going around, but I just, I'm like, I'm not really a tech guy. Right. I'm not a consumer. I'm not a good consumer. So nothing's grabbing you. I don't buy a lot of stuff. Yeah.

But, like, these drones, like, what is, what is the purpose? I mean, I guess for cinematography, I get that. Yeah. But why do we need so many drones? Yeah. I mean, if you've got, like, if you, if you, if you got a house out in the middle of nowhere, flying a drone is just fun.

It's a fun hobby. Don't think this is like, one of the themes of technology for the past years is everybody's waiting for the next, you know, iPhone. Everyone's waiting for the next thing that's going to change our lives. And it's like, that'll be a while. So in the meantime, just buy some toys. Well, you've got, you got, you got HQ, I think. That's neat your time.

But, no, I saw, you know, I saw these sleep beds and everyone's perfecting sleep now and cardio, doing this heart sensors, biometrics. I mean, someone's scientific practice, you know, applications are interesting. Yeah. But there's a lot of just, you know, disposable income. A lot of late capitalism on display here. Yeah, I think there's that hut.

It's like, everyone's not looking for the next iPhone because I know they can't do it. But then there's also the like, well, what if we did? Yeah. And that thing is a bed that watches you. And it's like, I don't want that. Or a robot that, you know, follows you around and plays music. I mean, I thought my phone follow me around with my earbuds is, you didn't know. So to me, the enduring question of CES is, why?

Why? Why? No, the one, it's the heart of every year, what will make you buy a new TV? So when was the last time you bought a TV? I don't buy TVs. I've never bought a TV. So nothing you sell out of the show will make you buy a new TV. No, I mean, they're thinner, their high resolution, they light up brighter now.

I mean, those two, those new TVs are probably not new anymore, but the ones were a few years ago I started seeing them, the 4K, I guess, the high depth where it looks like everyone's in a play. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You got to turn that off. Yeah. That's terrible. Yeah. It's scary.

Yeah. You can turn that setting off. Live on Circuit Breaker, Scott Rogowski hates motion smoothing. Is that what that is? Motion's moving. It's the worst. There's a whole movement of directors, Ryan Johnson, JJ Abrams, Sam S-Mail. They're all tweeting that these manufacturers should just disable that by the phone.

Yeah, it's bizarre. It's unsettling to watch that. So, no, I don't, I don't buy TVs. I have a three-CD stereo changer that I listen to going to bed at night and wake it up in the morning. Are you going to recognize that in the floor? People are freaking out? Yeah. Is your life completely changed because of HQ?

It has changed. in the ways that, yes, strangers want pictures with me where they didn't before. But beyond that, I mean, it's nice. I got 30% discount of Pinkberry. That's pretty good. The guys recognized me at Pinkberry. I'm like, can you give me an HQ discount?

And they hit 30%. Have you ever won one of your own games? Do you play? I do play one of your own games. Did you play today? I couldn't play today. I was busy, but I played yesterday. And yeah, I don't get very far.

It's hard. I've gotten about Q6, Q7, maybe eight. If extra life, get me to eight or nine. Sam got to 12 today and the Dieter gave him the wrong answer. Well, I guess, I guess. Okay, so the very first line of Conan the Barbarian quoted somebody. Did they quote Marcus Aurelius, Genghis Khan, or Friedrich Nietzsche? Yeah.

I'm going to go with Nietzsche. That's correct. Yeah. So everyone got this right except Dieter, and Sam lost today. I owe Sam 40 bucks. And then he raged quietly in the corner. But is it about the money? I'm curious because of someone I don't really get to use it.

So is it about the money or is it the hunt or the chase of playing? What appeals to HQ? It's one of the few live communal experiences you can have on your phone on the internet right now. So if we're about the community and being on Twitter and talking to people after the game and during the game and Slack.

And it being a game show is really smart. So I'm old enough where I was like when who wants to be a millionaire was a thing. You'd be like, oh, we're going to go watch it and the rest of America will watch it with us and we'll all be having this experience together. And the HQ has a tiny little phone-sized version of that.

And that's interesting to me. I think for a lot of people it's up the money. I disagree with either. We actually have reporters who've written about it, and the notion that there's free money available twice a day makes that game really interesting. It changes your dynamic with that shared social experience. Despite the odds being so difficult,

people play the lottery still for the chance to win millions of dollars. I mean, this you don't have to put in. There's no buy-in. So it's just free money. You're right, free money, that dangling carrot. But I think Dieter is hitting on it because it's that water cooler aspect that we sort of lost. with all this DVR and, you know, lazy media consumption,

you have to be in it to win it. You got to tune in. Yeah. You got your phrases, man. You got it. I've been trained. Yeah, the media training is a ride for you. Or is my doggie treat.

I get a little. So you become like a star because of H-K. Are you trying to turn that? I mean, you're like, literally Ashley Carman is like, oh man, we got to get selfie with Scott. Like that's a flex on Instagram. So get ready. You're going to leave here.

I'm like 15 people. You're going to take selfies with you. Are you trying to turn that in something else? You're trying to become a TV star? What's your movie? I mean, I'm just, look, I'm happy where I am. This is truthfully, I've been doing comedy, you know, for professionally for about 10 years. Yeah.

And there's a struggle. I mean, all my friends, every other comedian I know coming up with, you grind it out, you grind it out, and you hope something hits for a lot of my friends. They stuck with a stand-up, and they built that up and built that muscle and got on to Cohn and got a half-hour special, and now doing hour specials and touring the country and headlining clubs. I sort of went a different direction and started doing my own talk shows and doing videos for you. YouTube and building up my hosting skills. And I always thought it would lead to a talk show.

And then this game show came along and that's changing everything. But it just comes down to I enjoy doing it. I like the fact that I can now afford an apartment in New York. And it's just a fun. And being the face of this thing that so many people enjoy. And fomenting that sort of the community. We're building relationships and friendships. People are tweeting about.

about the fact that, oh, my kids never want to hang out with me. And now when that HQ theme music comes on, we're all getting the room together. And it's really over Thanksgiving and Christmas we saw that families coming together and playing HQ, schools stopping their class. Teachers saying, okay, time for HQ. Yeah. Offices shutting down. And the economy grinding to a hall.

The economy grinding to a hall. Plains falling from the sky. But at the same time, you know, team building. How many team building exercises are there? You go to some ropes course somewhere. That's not fun. This is cheaper and easier to get the whole community on board of the. the office together so well i gotta cancel this ropes course yeah forget the ropes course

uh well thank you very much for being here what are you doing this week you got i am i'm gonna be mike piazza tomorrow yeah wow i just got invited to meet mike piazza he's in town and i'm a huge meds fan so that's a dream and tonight i think rick ross and lauren hill are performing i saw maclomore last night yeah yeah so i'm trying to you know yeah you're getting the full c s experience i think so yeah yeah no were you there when the power went out today i was at the sand so we were saved from that yeah it's it just sounds like a way of war is it still out what happened It finally came back on. But they have to turn on all the computers and all the booths.

It's taking hours. So power's back, and then they've got to reboot all the booth. Someone might be losing some money. It'll leave me lawsuits. It's going to be something. All right, Scott, thank you so much for stopping by. Thank you, really appreciate it. Appreciate you.

I appreciate the coverage. The Verge is loving us. Yeah, we're doing all right. Play HQ. Yeah, HQ, download. If you haven't heard about it yet, it's in the Android, Google Play Store now. Yeah. Are you an iPhone?

Are you an iPhone? iPhones? I don't even have to say it. I have an iPhone. Apple Store, iOS, you can get it. It's free. Type in HQ. It should pop right up. Yeah. Except no imitations, because there are some now.

All right. All right. Thanks guys. That was great. That happened to us. I hope Sam's okay. Probably. It's probably going to be fine. That was the most of our news. You want to say two things about cars?

Yeah. There's so many cars here. North Harle is actually where the power went out first. Yeah. Just imagine a car show that was no power. Right. Like people probably stealing the cars. Just an enormous amount of car news.

And I think the main takeaway for you watching this show is like, yes, there's new head units and Mercedes has a new voice assistant called in this. I'm not making this up. Linguittronic. No. That's what Mercedes is named as new voice assistant. Their new interface in the car is MBUX with Linguatronic. Oh, my God.

Someone should help them. But you're seeing big platform plays from the carmakers now. So GM is doing self-driving taxis. Toyota has like basically rolling boxes with stores in them. Yeah. Ford is like, we're building an autonomous platform for cars. You're seeing them all trying to do... Pizza Hut?

Pizza Hut is, like, going to do... Is that a thing? Is that a real thing? Are they driving around with pizzas? I mean, they might be doing it as a stunt. The way to think about technology and pizza companies is that pizza companies just want you to remember that you can order a pizza.

Yeah. People want pizza. So Domin... Remember push for pizza? Yeah, yeah, no, but every time there's something, Domino's is like, now you can order a Domino's with an Alexa. Now you can order it off your... Xbox, right?

Like, all they're trying to do is make you remember that Domino's exists. Yeah. Right. And maybe you're going to order a pizza because it's, like, fun to push the button and it's gimmicky. Right. I think it's mostly gimmicky, though. It's all marketing for them. It's easier to just go online or use the app or pick up the phone and just say, hey, I want this instead of sending a throwing a frisbee and having a bird catch it and, you know, there's a whole.

Yeah. But if that Pizza Hut thing is not a concept, how do you guys? know how to get Pizza Hut from that autonomous pizza vehicle? We can find out. We'll figure it out. That seems like a question the Virge is capable of us. Yeah, we should do it. Can we get a pizza from our robot?

I feel like we're organized around that request. Hey, it's John O'Kane. I'm a transportation reporter at the Verge. What I was looking for at CES this year was probably a couple different things, but the two biggest were all the different self-driving stuff that was going to be here, because there's a lot of different kinds of it. The most exciting thing I saw was probably the volocopter,

which is this wild. octodeca copter is I think the term for it, or at least that's what I tried to figure out myself, which was on stage at Intel's keynote, and they have the sort of even newer version at a little booth near our trailer here, and that thing's just, it's crazy. It's like the thing I want to fly out of here the most, even though they're definitely not going to let me. Hey, it's Tom. I've been searching around CS for laptops, more laptops than I need to see in a month, let alone a year. I've been checking out. So, hey, it's HP did their Specter, X-360, a 15-inch.

Dell's done another 15 inch, the X-Pets 15. They've also refreshed their XPS 13. And I've kind of been looking around at those and some stuff from Lenova and ASA and trying to figure out what's happening in 2018 with laptops and what's the best one from the show and all that sort of stuff. I'll say that we usually see spinning crazy flipping laptops and crazy giant gaming rigs and all that sort of stuff. We haven't seen so many of those this year.

But in terms of the stuff I have seen, I'd say the XPS 15 is probably even more impressive just because it's got a MacLift keyboard, which in real terms basically means it has magnets underneath the keys. So the keys are still physically there in place. What this allows it to do is just a little bit clickier, even if you've got the short travel of the keys. It felt pretty good and we haven't really seen a lot of that from PC makers. Obviously Apple does quite a lot of cool stuff for the keyboards on the Mac line.

So it's interesting to see. Also, inside that laptop, there's an Intel processor that's been combined with AMD's Vegas GPU, which is their mobile chip, essentially. And that should be a little bit better for gaming than the sort of Intel stuff that we've seen before. And it's just an interesting combination of Intel and AMD in the same laptop, essentially,

and being all powered up by Intel. So I don't know, I feel like we'll probably see a lot more of that throughout 2018. And it'd be interesting to see where that partnership goes. It'd be really cool if we see some laptops that can play games that aren't giant. Starting to see some of those come through, but it'd be nice to see them come down to like the 14 inch or even the 30 inch reform factor would be pretty good to say. But apart from that, Acer did a Swift 7 update. So then now the world's finished laptop again.

The keyboard and it's not very good though, so we'll see what happens there. But it's still kind of interesting to see them pushing everyone to go thinner and lighter and stuff. That's always a good thing. But I feel like we've got to the point where laptops are probably light enough anyway. Obviously, Razor did like their Razor phone dock stuff. And the laptop is just a prototype. So kind of like similar to the stuff they did last year with their prototypes.

And that just basically you dock a phone into this like fake laptop essentially. And that powers it all up. I don't think we're going to see a phone that's going to turn into a laptop anytime soon. It's certainly not this year. But a CES is all, a lot of it is about experimentation. A lot of these products don't even come out. come out half the time so still good to see I want to do a little tiny bit of news because we couldn't do it yesterday because Quiz Daddy blew up our whole show

Quiz Daddy yeah I call them quiz daddy I just that's it's like no but TVs it's a TV show we've already talked about a bunch of stuff yeah but Sony's got the new TVs fine TCL's got the Roku assistant and last year the TCL 4k TV was one of our favorite TVs of the year because it was like the best deal you could get yeah they've iterated on that TV and we expect that's still going to be a a great deal. Yeah. So we're excited about that.

But I think the most interesting TV news here actually didn't come from TV companies and isn't technically TV news. Okay. It's, Nvidia has been doing,

you know, G-Sync with monitors. Like, they've made a 65-inch version of this. So if you don't know what G-Sync is, it's a variable refresh rate. The best analog, probably that most, the Razor phone has a variable

refresh rate LCD on the phone, but probably most of you where you'd experience it is on the iPad Pro. Right. Apple's Promotion, so the iPad Pro usually runs, you know, 60 frames a second. When you're using the pencil, it zooms up to 120 hertz refresh rate. Right. Which is way more responsive.

So there's a bunch of technology that PC gamers have taken for granted that allows them to do really great, get great picture. And I think that we're going to start to see that come to TVs. I love that. InVVVVVD, by the way, is a big format gaming displays, BFGD. Yeah. There's a, there's an F there that makes. That's pretty good.

But the coolest monitor technology that everyone was excited about, there was just a couple of mirrors that AIS made and you put them in between your two monitors and it refracts the light just a little bit so that the two bezels disappear. And you know, it's like, it's not, there's no actual display there, it's just like refracting a little bit of light, but it makes a three display setup completely immersive. That's pretty cool. And you know, Samsung's got its panel so we're starting to see different ways to plug all this stuff together. Anyway, that was my quick TV.

I want to, just on the G-Sync, variable refresh rate stuff, if you're a big home theater nerd like me, you're out there. G-sync is another light for you to have to try and turn on on your system. You like it's very important to me.

But no, there's a huge problem. So games are great. You want to zoom up the refresh rate for games. Drop that latency. Yep. What did the kids say? PubG. Fragmore PubG. Fragmore PubG. something anyone's ever said before.

Wow. Cool. Whatever Sam says to himself. You are not that old. I'm just leaning into it, man. Look this baby face over here. All right. Wait, I'm on here where you're going to say, though.

So you want to zoom up that refresh rate. But when you watch a movie, you actually want to crank it all the way down to 24. Because that's what it shot in. You shoot 24, yeah. Which is more cinematic. Right. It's been really hard to do that. So another good example is what you plug the Apple TV in.

or whatever, Apple wants to run it at that highest refresh rate possible. So there's tons of menu animations, Siri, all this stuff. But then they've got to compensate for it when they show the movie. Variable refresh rate display. You don't see that blackout, black, when you switch modes. It runs at 24, you hit the Siri button. It zooms up to 120. So you get this user interface pattern that's much better for everything in home theater.

I've been waiting for this stuff to hit TVs forever. I'm super excited. You're saying the UI elements will be, at 120 frames per second, right? And then, like, the actual film movie can stay at the 24. No, they won't be operating independent speeds. I'm saying, you're watching a movie

that the TV runs at 24. Yeah, you hit the Siri button. The TV will speed up to 120, because now you're trying to use. Now you haven't existed before, like on televisions? No. What about, like, the true motion stuff? It's either on or off with that?

Yeah, so all that stuff has weird labels and weird marketing names, but, like, fundamentally what they're doing is they're saying, okay, we give in, you're going to run this at 30. or 60 frames for second because that makes animations look smooth. Now we're going to do a pulldown and find ways to duplicate frames so it looks like 24 frames. So bottom line.

And it's like that's a very complicated math puzzle. And now we're seeing it at C.S. Right. No. So that's what they've been done before. But I feel like that's a step towards maybe they're going to try and infiltrate TVs and I hope that happens. For me, the bottom line is there haven't been enough acronyms and weird terms in TV and now we're going to get some more.

And it's really excited. I've never been more excited. I'm so down for this. Best of CES. Best of CES. Let's do it. You want to start with the best TV? Well, the best TV.

Yeah, we're just talking to TV. It has to be Samsung's The Wall. An homage to Pink Floyd. I looked at it today. Okay, tell us what you thought. I went and looked at it. So, like, the thing about the walls is modular bricks and putting it together and make TV.

And it's that, and it's also micro lead, which is potentially a very exciting technology because you get the benefits of all load What are that many of its drawbacks? What are the drawbacks? They burn in and they like fade and they do weird things. Yeah, that's true. They don't last.

It's modular. So it's the way the wall is built is it's segments of micro lead displays and you click them together and you make a TV of whatever size you want. Yeah. That's the promise of the wall. So you can go as big or as small as you want,

you can change the aspect of the ratio. They said the max was 120. 126. No, it's 146. What size did you see it at? The biggest 144. Are there bezels or edges? So if you get real close to it, you can see, but you can't.

At any normal distance, you're going to look at 146-inch TV, you can't see it. TV looks great. Wow. It's beautiful. It's bright. It's big. I just think it's the best TV because it's the most innovative. It is a repackaging of technology.

It's actually been around for a while, which is how they build stadium displays. Right. So they're consumerizing this set of solved problems. Do you not want a stadium display in your living room? I kind of do. I looked at it today, and I was like, all right. It's a cool display. But would I rather have a 4K

projector? Would I rather just have a giant TV? It's like, they've got to explain to me why I want a custom size screen. But it's cool as hell. I think the Ralee TV, we gave that a different award, but I think the Rolay TV is actually much more interesting TV. Okay. Because it's like a much

more complicated type of way. Okay, so we'll jump in. But anyway, but we did, the staff voted Best TV is the law. Yeah. Yeah. Best Robot to Paul here. Best Robot has to be the Ibo, the new Sony eyeball. Have you seen this thing? Yeah. It is ridiculously cute.

It's way more articulated than the last eyeball. Things are rolling instead of just like on a hinge. Like every part of the dog is touch sensitive. It is pretty mobile and can move around. It can pick up a bone. It looks very expressive. It has

OLED eyes so it can make more expressions with its eyes. It has its own charging pad and it knows where it is and it will just tootle itself over there and lay down on it Literally every person who's seen the eyeball has fallen completely in love with this room. Yeah, it's just, it is, they have done such a good job of making this thing adorable. This is like, fraggin joystick jockeys and Ubjian.

We saw this thing like a decade ago. I remember when I was 15 and you went to like those like on the bottom of an article, five mind-blowing robots and it's like this dog that costs $8,000. Right. So they discontinued it. Right. Some people were so sad about them discontinuing it. They've held funerals for their robot dogs. They're bringing it back with all the technology advances we've had.

in those past 10 years or so. How much is this thing? 500 bucks? I don't know. It's only available in Japan for now, but it understands English commands, and so we are very, very hopeful it will come to the US. How are you not in love with this, Sam?

It's got a camera on the top so it can look around, see where it is. Are we going to go to a point where we're going to have a robot pets now? Yeah, yeah. This dog, if you interact with it more, it becomes imprinted on you and it wants to hang out with you more than the other people in the family.

That's, okay. I can't believe you're skeptical at this. It's just like, why not just get a real dog? Because you have to, a real dog has to do stuff. Yeah, you need to bring it to the bed, you need to feed it real food. I get it, I get it. When I was at the Sony booth last night with my dad,

in the corner, there was just like 25 people with their phones up, taking pictures, and it was a robot dog. Yeah. The dream. Literally the dream. If you refuse to be excited about a robot dog, are you excited about a new atrix?

I don't know I is I like the segue I like the segue yes I don't know that's like we made no son he tried

none at all yeah yeah this is my favorite category most or best CES best CES not best of CES

no no best CES the most CES thing the thing that's what that means the thing that encapsulates the show

the most ridiculous like when you think of CES like weird quirky gadgets yeah just the most insane thing

this is what we have this is what we have Project Linda it's from Razor concept though right it's a concept it's not shipping but it is an idea that's been around for a real long time which is you have a smartphone it's a big powerful computer what if you just make it a laptop so that we're Dieter was saying the Motorola at Erix years ago came out at CES you could stick it into it uh what we call it the lap doc yes it's sticking that dock though right like on the screen right where it was flipped up behind the screen it was weird

yeah it was not a good product this one does it the best the razor phone becomes the track pad of a laptop. It's such a brilliant. Every time I look at my MacBook laptop, because they're huge now. It should be, yes. It should be the phone, right? You should be able to object.

You could put information there, there's all kinds of stuff. So it's just a concept. It's called Project Linda. It is the most insane thing, because at the end of the day, what you have acquired is an Android laptop. So does it have a brain the computer?

Or it's just a keyboard and a screen? And then you put the phone in, and then it boots Android all, like it kind of just turns. Yeah, mirrors. Android up on the screen. Okay. So you use all your Android.

So there's no hardware in the laptop. There's no... Presumably some hardware in the laptop to drive all the keyboard and display and whatever. Okay. But it doesn't have its own independent processor. The brain is the phone. You get a battery.

And then the phone screen becomes the track pad. Brilliant. I'm telling you this is like one of my dreams. You think we'll see this thing? Because remember last year the tri-screen razor laptop and then Project Ariana, the whole kind of that, those are not. I think Razor wants to...

Hey, buddy. They love to concept. things, proof of concept, win Verge Awards, and then we'll see you next year with something else. People love the Razor Fund. All right, this is your fame. This is our best mobile accessory.

This is the new DGI Osmo. This is still a beta version that I'm using right now, so it's a little buggy. But it does all the stuff you expect at Osmo to do. I can draw a box around Nelai's head, and then I can track him automatically. So there he is, and then as we move

around, it follows him. Whoa. Yeah. So what's interesting about this thing is it's way cheaper. It's like 130 bucks, which is super cheap. Less than half the price of the original. They switched it to an internal battery, so you can just recharge it directly, which some people are annoyed by.

It's fine. They put the mount on the bottom. But most importantly, to me, you'll see here, vertical. You can mount your phone either, oh, it's still following you. It just blows you so much. You can mount your phone horizontally or vertically, which means if you want to get your Snapchat game on, if you want to, for me it's Apple Clips

because I'm an old nerd. The one Apple Clips user. I'm the one person. If you're the Apple Clips team, please reach out to Deeter. He's the only person with a nose for you. But I mean, look, this is like, it's pretty good. Yeah. And then I can.

It's like I said, this is still beta. So you have the old one, right? But it's super cheap. Yeah, it's great. That feels a little bit cheaper. The material feels just like a little bit cheaper and then they got rid of the trigger on the back. I like that they move the mount to the bottom.

Does it still charge over? 3.5 millimeter? No, it's charged over a micro. Micro. Yeah. But like it got rid of the, they changed the power switch so it's a standard like DGI double tap to turn it on and off.

Like all the drones, but I mean the price is. Really, really small here. I think the price here is the whole story. When the original Osmo came out, I bought at the Apple store for $300. And I thought it was worth $300. And now, like you get, like I said, the material, it feels way cheaper, I think.

But I mean, for $130. For $130. Yeah. Yeah, like if you, if you, if you, if you, if you vlog at all, this is an easy buy. If you're an Instagram storier, yeah. That's probably for you. You vlog a little bit. Yeah, here and there.

On the tubes. Yeah. Between your PUBG frag matches. Oh, man. Okay. Wow. So we already, you already named. We already need my wrist prototype.

The I Patel's text is texting me, your frag matches. I don't know what I mean. Is it all? Do you want to say anything else about the best prototype, the LG OLED TV that rolls up? I mean, this is, I was on the show for a lot of people, and I was like, this is fundamentally a show about display technologies. Yep, it makes it set. I should make that sad.

It's just a show about display technologies, ultimately, where are we going to put them, what they're going to look like, what shapes are going to be, and I think having rollable displays that can actually be products, you're going to see them everywhere. It's like, it's like the super high-end, I mean, there's probably one in this room where the TV at the foot of your bed goes in and out, right? See, that convinces me. Just up against a wall that's dumb,

but to have it at the foot of bed. It's contained in that box. Yeah. And it's presumed, I mean, no one's seen the inside, right? Does it actually roll up? No one's seen the mechanism of that. Right. But presumably, it rolls up, right?

And then, yeah, I think that would be a really cool. Yeah, I don't think they're like David Copperfielding this, right? They're like, it's like, who. No, I think it's actually doing what they say it's doing. Yeah. They've demoed that kind of technology before. And then you can probably. connect like your Xbox to it or your TV.

Right. So I love this thing. All right. Google Assistant has been everywhere. Yeah. It came out on a few new speakers that look interesting, but we haven't really tried to me on, so we've used them a bit, but they're like pretty derivative of Alexa.

So rather than giving them best in show, we have given Google Assistant most in show. Yeah. It's just it's just the most. It's here the most. Yeah. And then lastly, this was a big first. fight. This was like a long, involved conversation.

The best of CES, the best in show for the Verge. We gave it to the fingerprint sensor. Yeah, the synaptics clear ID fingerprint sensor. Now, here's why. I think it's going to, it's real, it works, it works very well. It's in a shipping product, which almost nothing in CES is. We expect it's going to be a mini more shipping products in the Vo, yeah. Which like, no, but it's going to be in the S-Eye.

It's still made it. It's going to be there. Yeah, it'll be in a million Android phones, I'm sure of it. Yeah. And it's they solve the problem that nobody else has solved. Everyone's putting fingerprint sensors in the back or way up in the corner or they're inventing entirely brand new laser technologies to scan your face. They're like Apple put so much work into face ID.

And, you know, it's worth it. That's where they're going. But synaptics with the fingerprint sensor under the screen solved that problem in a way that like everybody wanted everybody to solve that problem for the past five years. How did they do it? And no one else did. Well, they had to wait for... Well, it's their business.

Synaptics? Yeah, synaptics make touchpads, they make fingerprint sensors. And then they partnered with... They make it available. They are the component supplier for almost all of these products. Yeah.

So why do they choose that phone first, do you think? Because Vivo probably was like, yeah, screw it, we'll launch a phone. Veevo's the fourth largest phone manufacturer in the world. They're huge, and nobody knows it. Oh, they're just, they're not in America. But Viva also makes it.

Papa, like they're everywhere. One plus. It's just a little bit surprising. No, if you're Samsung, you don't want to give the S-9 away. Yeah. Right. Samsung's going to announce to the S-9.

You both are banking on the S-9 having this built in. Every Android phones now has this thing. And so S-9's coming to mobile to Congress. They didn't want to announce it here because you don't announce phones here unless you're VFO. And then win awards. Right. There it is again.

There it is. But Synaptics does want to be here because half the business of CES isn't us going out to the show for you and me and nerds. It's making deals, selling your components, getting into retail. And so synaptics had to be here.

So if Vivo is willing to announce their phone so they can show off the fingerprint sensor at CES, of course they're going to, they'll take whoever is willing to do it. And they took Vivo. And you don't see any markings on the screen or anything. It is a... No. I mean, there's like a graphical response, so you know where to push. Right, but there's no...

No. A ring or something. It requires OLED, it requires OLED, you can see through, because LCD has to be backward. I see. Right? And so OLED doesn't because it's, you know, organically lit. It's from the pixel itself. We are really, I mean, this is very cool technology to really exist.

I think the component's like seven millimeters thin to fire room correctly? I mean, it's cool. Yeah. There it is. But what's your argument? What's the best in show? This is a wild razor thing. And the answer is like it's the thing that's going to ship and change our lives.

And it's already shipping. And I think this is going to be a really important. I don't think everyone else is going to race to face ID. I think they're going to go with this thing. Yep. I think so. I think so. I'm a touch ID every day.

On Vlad itself, senior editor with Verve. So I've come here to CES 2018 looking for the latest developments in headphone technology A lot of it is actually a continuation of what has already been happening It's a segment of tech industry that is very much in flux at the moment There's been a big switch toward wireless headphones especially in ears There's this phenomenon called the neck buds Which are essentially wireless headphones with a connecting cable and sometimes even a plastic column Which I find atrocious and horrible

They've kind of made a resurgence this year at CES, but in general Quocom has also introduced a new true wireless chip which is making making it easier to make true wireless earbuds without any connections. So that is really the big thing that every tech company seems to be pushing when it comes to consumer level audio, portable audio especially. One thing that is almost entirely missing nowadays is a pair of over-air wired headphones. Everybody seems to be doing wireless. canceling is another big feature. It does seem to be the case that features rather than just pure

audio quality are the thing that the companies are pushing hardest. One of the highlights on the audio firefront actually is Senheiser. They just introduced the HD 820, which is a closeback version of their flagship headphone, the HD 800S. It's the exact same audio driver. It just enclosed back, which means that you don't need a dedicated listening room for it. It makes the audio fire habits A bit more social, although it doesn't make it any more affordable because it costs $2,400. So it's an interesting development, but maybe only of academic or enthusiast interest. This is the moment we've all been waiting for. I'm Paul Miller with the verge, and I found a robot that can go to the kitchen,

go open the fridge, get a can of Diet Coke or an adult beverage, and bring it to you. Oh, hey. And then he dabs. He dabs on the robot haters who thought this day could never come. So my buddy AOLIS has other functionality other than fridge beer delivery. You can actually attach a vacuum cleaner. It can sweep. It can move chairs around so it gets the chairs away and then it sweeps.

It's supposed to be able to find your glasses. We'll see how well that works. So what's important to know is that this will not be cheap, but they're trying to make it kind of affordable. It's gonna ship by the end of this year and they're saying a roughly equivalent to a family of four on vacation overseas. So whatever you think that means,

so maybe less than $20,000. In the labs, like universities build robots that have some of these functionalities and it's like $300,000. So it's really cool if they can get this into the home for under the cost of your home. That'd be nice. I'm obviously pretty excited.

I've seen a lot of robots. I've seen a lot of robots at this show, but none of them do anything other than vacuum or just look cute. So I'm ready. I'm ready for this to happen. Okay, everybody, this is the end of our show. Thank you, Ashley, Lauren, Sam, bring it in, fam.

Come on in. Like and subscribe, but our channel, not Sam's. I'll bring it back. Thank you everybody for watching our show here at CES. It's been a wild four days. So many people have watched the show. It's actually, the numbers are kind of a stabbing. It's been really fun to make.

Thank you to this crew. It's been super fun. We're going to go back to where we live. We're going to keep doing this show. We're going to be right here? We do now, Sam. I have terrible news. Thank you everybody for watching.

CES is over. There's still yet some more coverage on the site that's trickling out. Go on our YouTube channel, watch all the videos, read all the stories, and we will see you on Circuit Brick Live soon. You want to talk about CES? Let's talk about CES. Every year the most important people from tech and media and science and art come together in Vegas to talk about the future. What our world is going to look like next year, five years from now, and 100 years from tomorrow.

And let's be honest, a lot of this stuff never comes true. CES is all about dreams and hype, not about reality. But you know what? That's great. Because you can complain about being in Vegas, you can complain about noise and crowds. But you can't complain about hundreds of thousands. of people all gathered together for a week to try and build the future. A future where cars and phones and TVs, even refrigerators are getting smarter and smarter every day.

Why the hell do we need a smart fridge? Who knows? But it's amazing to think about the possibilities. That's why we come to CES. Not to complain about the lack of prices and ship dates, but to see the biggest ideas on the biggest stage in tech. And maybe. Just maybe.

Catch a little glimpse of the future. Thank you.