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‘The platforms that win won’t be the smartest’
How smart does the smart home really need to be? At IFA 2026, Hisense set out its vision for bringing TVs, appliances and AI together, with VIDAA AIOS and ConnectLife at the heart of a more connected home. ERT’s Will McGill reports from Berlin.
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f there was one thing you couldn’t escape at IFA this year, it was AI. It was in televisions, washing machines, ovens, fridges and just about anything else manufacturers could squeeze a chip into. Hisense, however, arrived in Berlin arguing that making individual products clever isn’t really the point anymore. Its pitch was a home where those products actually talk to one another - and, perhaps more importantly, understand what you’re trying to do without requiring another app, menu or voice command.
That vision took centre stage at the company’s IFA 2026 press conference, where Hisense unveiled VIDAA AIOS, expanded its ConnectLife platform and introduced a new generation of AI-powered appliances spanning cooking, laundry and air care.
And while some of the scenarios presented on stage felt distinctly futuristic, your television noticing you’ve had a rough day and preparing the house for a relaxing evening, for example, there was a much more immediate message underneath it all: Hisense wants to make the television the brain of the connected home.
Making the home smart Taking to the stage, Denis Oštir, Senior Director of Communications at VIDAA, argued that while AI is already appearing throughout the home, most of those applications currently exist in isolation. “The television knows entertainment. The
refrigerator knows food. The washing machine knows laundry,” he said. “Each device is intelligent and, we have to say it, made better by AI. But the home is not.”
That, according to Hisense, is the problem VIDAA AIOS is designed to tackle. Rather than simply waiting for commands, the new operating system is intended to understand the context around them. Hisense describes four stages - sense, think, communicate and execute - which allow the system to recognise what is happening around the home before deciding what action is needed. “The core of AIOS is that it understands intent and understands context,” Mr Oštir explained. “Instead of asking, ‘What did the user request?’, it asks, ‘What is the user trying to achieve?’” And the television has been picked to sit at the centre of all this.
It makes sense when you think about it. It is
already connected, increasingly powerful and, unlike a smartphone, is generally shared by everyone in the household. Hisense therefore sees the TV developing from another connected product into what Mr Oštir called the “natural command centre” of the home. That also means changing the television itself. Rather than displaying essentially the same homepage every time it is switched on, AIOS is designed to recognise different members of the household and alter what appears accordingly. A parent settling down in the evening might
be presented with the series they were watching the night before, while a child could automatically receive age-appropriate content and parental controls. An older family member, meanwhile, could see news and weather presented through an interface designed for them. “For the first time, the TV doesn’t just show you content,” Mr Oštir said. “It understands the family by understanding each user individually, the timing and the context.”
One home, one system Where things become more ambitious is when that intelligence leaves the television. Hisense used the example of a football match to demonstrate its thinking. AIOS could know when a game is taking place, remind the user to order drinks, work out when a frozen pizza needs to go into the oven and, as kick-off approaches, switch the television into its match mode, adjust the lighting and change the room temperature. After the final whistle, it could schedule the washing machine to run overnight, charge an EV when electricity is cheaper and have personalised match highlights ready to watch later.
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