Dreame's laundry care robot independently handles the entire cycle: picking up clothes, washing and drying, and taking them out.

DREAME

Imagine going to the gym for a hard work out. Then, you get in your car and the car notifies your smart home that you are 11 minutes away. The refrigerator is notified that you were exercising and lost electrolytes, so not only prepares a cold glass of water for you, but also suggests some dinner recipes with extra protein to help build muscle according to your goals.

Because you are hot, the temperature in the car and in the house are automatically adjusted to cool you off and will return to normal after 30 minutes. Your wearable ring notifies the coffee maker that you didn’t get the optimal eight hours of sleep, so it adjusts to brew a little bit stronger cup of Joe.

All of this happens instantly and behind the scenes and nearly all of it is possible today from Dreame.

The company recently revealed its newest evolution of smart home products at an event that explored the future of interoperability across every aspect of a consumer’s life, and solving for what has been the achilles heel of the industry to date - interoperability.

“Technology companies are not good at interoperability, but that is what Dreame is doing with appliances and devices,” said James Keyes, former CEO of 7-Eleven at the launch event. “Apple did that with Macs, calendars, phones, watches. Until it all came together in one place, it wasn’t very useful.”

Smarter Smart Home Products

Research firm Parks Associates forecasts that the smart home market will continue slow and steady growth, with 102 million smart home device unit sales in 2024, up 8% from 2023. The firm predicts that by 2029, smart home device revenue will reach nearly $15 billion.

Industry players are strategically expanding their product ecosystems with complementary and adjacent offerings that offer seamless integration. The true value being the interaction and interoperability of the devices to enhance the user experience. Plus, it creates a new revenue stream to offer tech support as a value-added service, which also means a longer term relationship with the user.

“From the very beginning, Dreame had the vision of building a human, car, and home,” said Michael Meng, the president of Dreame Robotic Vacuums Unit. “It’s in our DNA to have personal information more accessible in the process so all the devices learn from your habits and perform to suit your needs.”

For the physical product, the driving mechanism is Dreame’s bionic robotic arm design that shows up in nearly every smart product. Starting with the air conditioner, it takes the form of a dual-arm airflow system for wide-angle and zone-targeted air distribution.

The AC also offers AI‑driven energy savings, intelligent temperature control and voice interaction. The unit learns from the user’s habits to adjust automatically, and to deliver more comfort and cost savings. On the cleanliness side, the AC uses UV sterilization and silver‑ion filtration to create continuous fresh air.

The refrigerator goes beyond the basics of keeping food fresh, plus it can actively manage the user’s health. An AI food recognition system can understand food types, can analyze nutritional content and freshness, and can provide personalized meal plans tailored for children, weight management, or other targets.

It can identify up to 1,800 ingredients at more than 95% accuracy in ideal unobstructed environments, and recognized about 70% of plastic wrapped ingredients. Plus, AI and Dreame’s electrode membrane technology can level the oxygen in the preservation drawer at around 5% so food can last longer.

Banking on the power of AI, Dreame is partnering with Google Gemini to expand the list of recognizable ingredients from 1,800 to 10,000; to improve its accuracy to 97%; and to improve accuracy in challenging scenarios to 80%.

Biometric sensors built into the fridge handle can recognize the user as they open the door and also can sync with Dreame bands, rings, and body fat scales to build a complete picture of a user’s health, allowing it to analyze and predict health conditions, and to create a goal-oriented health plan with more than 85% accuracy and a body weight trend prediction error of less than 5%.

Dreame also covers all water scenarios in the home, including a new faucet with two arms, one for drinking and another for washing that can rotate 180 degrees. It also offers such a force of bubbles that it can clean at a pure physical level without any detergent, providing a 98% sterilization rate and removing 96% of pesticide residue.

The Dreame coffee maker uses AI to learn habits and to sync with wearables to monitor your body's signals and recommend drinks that are good for you.

Outside the kitchen, Dreame launched a laundry care robot that can independently handle the entire cycle from picking up clothes, to putting them in the wash, moving them to the dryer, and then taking them out.

Dreame also has cooktops, a window cleaner robot, AI smart lighting, and smart locks.

“Making technology accessible drives societal progress, and as Dreame continues to innovate, it aspires to shape the future ecosystem of smart home appliances and move closer to supporting humanity as a whole,” Meng said.

Dreame is integrating AI such as deep neural networks and 3D scene reconstruction for object detection and recognition, fusion perception, navigation and positioning, map management, and scene semantic understanding to create its ecosystem and to strengthen the user experience.

AI Is Rebuilding Smart Home Technology

AI is making much more possible. Advances in AI also are accelerating product iteration cycles to create products that are easier to manage and maintain.

Elizabeth Parks, president and CMO at Parks Associates, notes that smart home devices can collect a wide range of data—from usage patterns and energy consumption to individual preferences and environmental conditions—which allows for a smart, responsive, and a more personalized user experience.

Historically, the data has been siloed into individual applications, but AI and machine learning are able to create more intelligent, whole-home experiences. For example, AI can help by detecting and identifying devices on the network and detect configuration errors or issues and automatically apply corrections or adjustments.

AI’s capabilities to predict can help automate and optimize service with better reliability, less downtime, and with that seamless connectivity that users need. It also creates new ways to interact with the user across many lifestyle areas.

“Dreame is building out that AI ecosystem,” Meng added. “We want to offer that convenience. The company that wins will have the entire ecosystem built.”

Stepping into The Smart Home Future

Creating that ecosystem won’t be easy.

“Companies won’t win just from software or just from hardware,” said Yossi Feinberg, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “It will require integrating the two. You can’t follow the industry best, you have to disrupt.”

The impact of AI will be profound and far reaching, even if the changes themselves unfold gradually over time.

“We are adapting to the new world in a great way with the new speed of innovation,” said Sebastian Thrun, former Google vice president and co-founder of Google X . “It’s now insanely fast to create products like Dreame is doing, which means we’ll have more innovation. For pharmaceuticals, it costs a billion dollars to put a drug on the market. Now, it will be $2,000 because testing will be automated. It is one of many examples to be excited to be alive today. We are witnessing history literally.”

In this new age of digital innovation, people are still important—the users and the developers.

“Human experience is so varied and that’s what makes us come alive and we want products that expand on that,” said Sylvia Acevedo, a former NASA Scientist and board member. “You sell products on how you make people feel and the experiences that they want. You might have something on the table [digital device] when you are celebrating a holiday, but it’s having the people around you that you remember and now we need to create products that fit seamlessly into that and enhance those experiences."

AI has those capabilities to help users go beyond what is ordinary.

“If you think you can bypass the people, you can’t,” said 7-Eleven’s Keyes. “Technology is an enabler for people. The opportunity, if we chose to take it, is that AI will accelerate human curiosity. To use the current version of AI, it will only be as good as our prompts. It’s stimulating our curiosity in a very subtle way. If it can make us a little more curious, a little more innovative, that’s what we need, technology that will stimulate more curiosity.”

Acevedo adds that companies serving this industry need to be adaptable.

“It needs leaders who can think across domains and make linkages,” she said. “There is complexity to creating a product, it’s immense, and the skills required aren’t just labor, or managing the supply chain, that leader needs to have domain expertise and consumers are changing as well with more demands.”

As technology advances, so do consumer expectations to deliver a smart, personalized smart home experience. The future is coming fast.