October 2026 ertonline.co.uk


It is certainly a long


way from asking Alexa to turn the lights off. But Hisense was also keen to address one of the obvious questions raised when a manufacturer starts talking about a home that knows who is in the room and what they are doing: privacy.


Mr Oštir said AIOS has been designed


around “transparency, privacy and user choice”, with sensitive processing taking place locally through edge AI rather than automatically sending everything into the cloud. “The better we understand you, the more we


ensure control always remains in your hands,” he said.


“The platforms that win won’t be the smartest. They’ll be the ones the people trust the most.”


Into the kitchen


That connected-home thinking was carried directly into Hisense’s appliance business by Boštjan Pečnik, Vice President of Hisense Europe. He introduced the latest development of ConnectLife, Hisense’s AIoT platform, alongside a new generation of AI-enabled appliances covering the kitchen, laundry and air environment.


At the heart of this is a new suite of five AI Companions covering cooking, laundry, air, energy and support.


The idea is to move beyond opening an app


to remotely start an appliance and towards products making decisions – or at least recommendations – themselves. “Home appliances are no longer just tools


that wait for a command,” Mr Pečnik told the audience. “They are becoming intelligent companions that anticipate your needs.” In the kitchen, that starts with the fridge. Hisense’s AI Companion refrigerator uses a high-definition camera to keep track of food


Laundry without the guesswork Laundry gets similar treatment. Hisense’s AI Companion laundry system uses what it calls AI Fabric Vision Recognition to analyse a load across seven areas, including the fabric, colour and weight. From there, the AI Laundry Agent selects an


appropriate cycle, while AI Super Wash can automatically adjust the washing and drying settings. It is another example of where AI potentially becomes easier to explain on the shop floor. Rather than simply selling “AI” as another badge on the fascia, the proposition becomes the machine recognising what has been loaded and choosing the programme for you.


entering and leaving the appliance and can alert users when something is approaching its use-by date.


Consumers can then tell the system what they fancy eating and receive a personalised recipe, while Hisense says it can also build weekly meal and nutrition plans around individual preferences. Crucially, the different appliances are supposed to work together. Once a recipe has been selected, its settings can be sent directly to a compatible oven, removing the need for the user to programme it manually.


The AI Companion oven itself uses a food


probe alongside visual recognition to monitor cooking and adjust settings where necessary. “As it learns your preferences, it continuously


refines and personalises recipes,” Mr Pečnik explained. There was even some AI for the wine cabinet, which can recommend a bottle to accompany a chosen dish and monitor temperature and humidity to protect what is inside.


The company is applying the same principle to air conditioning. Its Smart Eye Pro technology uses infrared sensors to detect where people are in a room, with airflow automatically directed towards or away from them depending on their preference. Across all of these categories, Hisense’s message was remarkably consistent: the consumer should have to do less.


The next pass Of course, it wouldn’t be a Hisense press conference without football.


Earlier in the keynote, the manufacturer confirmed that it will be an official partner of UEFA Euro 2028, continuing a relationship that began with Euro 2016. The next tournament will be particularly significant for the UK market, with matches taking place across the UK and Ireland – giving Hisense another major platform for its TVs and wider brand. But beyond the sponsorship announcement and the inevitable avalanche of AI terminology, Hisense’s IFA presentation raised an interesting question about where the smart home goes next. For years, manufacturers have promised connected appliances. The challenge has often been persuading consumers why they should actually connect them. Hisense’s answer is to make that connection less visible.


If its vision works, consumers won’t necessarily need to think about whether the fridge, oven, TV and washing machine are connected at all. They will simply expect the products around them to understand what is happening and work together.


That is a considerably bigger ambition than making a smarter television or adding another clever programme to a washing machine. As Mr Oštir put it: “Not a smarter television, not a smarter appliance - a smarter home which is built around you.” At IFA 2026, Hisense made its case for what that home could look like. Now comes the rather more difficult part: getting consumers to invite it in.


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