LG Appliances Integrate With Messaging App LINE

Yes, you heard it right. LG will be debuting LINE chat capabilities integrated into their smart appliances, so you can chat with your dishwasher or fridge. The partnership works to let users command their appliances within the popular messaging app, thereby embedding the internet of things into their daily routine. I chat with my friends letting them know I’ll be out of town in one thread and tell my washing machine that it should go into energy saving mode. It works a bit like Siri for text, interpreting commands using natural language processing.

The decision for LG to work with Line opposed to only a proprietary app, for instance, is an interesting one. Instead of creating new systems, LG is bringing itself into the products and service you already use, making them more natural and seamless. 

Qualcomm’s Internet Of Everything

One of the many interesting technologies presented here at Mobile World Congress by Qualcomm is their section they dubbed the Internet of Everything. They are promoting their recent experiments with the AllJoyn platform, that allows devices using their chips to communicate easily with eachother. The AllJoyn project is an open source project, but Qualcomm has dived head first into supporting it. It is meant to integrate with many different types of platforms, including Linux, Android and Windows Phone.

In an imagined use case, you would buy a coffee maker and take it home. It would have the applicable Qualcomm chipset in it and would be labelled as supporting AllJoyn. Through a to-be-determined process, you would pair it with your phone or tablet, and then be able to control it. You could remotely order it to start brewing, tell it how strong to make the coffee, and alert you when it’s done. The coffee maker could also then turn on the TV when it finishes brewing or pull up the New York Times website on your tablet.

A brand opportunity could be to build a branded app that interfaces with these appliances. So for instance, Folgers could sponsor a special Coffee-control app that does something special and on-brand for them.

There are no devices that support this framework out on the market currently, but apparently there will be a couple home appliances launching sometime this year which support AllJoyn. In the meantime Qualcomm continues to push innovation with this budding standard.