Hisense Wants to Turn Its TVs Into Smart Hubs (but Their Integration Plan Is Confusing)
CES 2025 is just around the corner, which means most tech companies are on the verge of major releases for their lineups. Following this year’s trend, Hisense announced this week that it is promoting its own smart platform that will cover all of its devices. Moreover, you will most likely access this smart platform on your TV, which is the main way most people learn about Hisense. Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to try out a number of features that Hisense promises in other brands, and many of them are more useful in theory than in practice. Hopefully, however, the small changes Hisense makes to each feature will yield better results.
Hisense turns its TV into a hub
Hisense’s platform, called ConnectLife, will offer a 3D view of your smart home on Hisense TVs and allow you to access your entire smart home from the platform. Listening to their presentation, I was struck by how similar this was to Samsung’s promise at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Last year, Samsung announced that it would integrate SmartThings , its smart platform, into its TVs with similar 3D imaging.
As someone who owns a Samsung TV, I was delighted with the integration of SmartThings, a platform I also use. However, I can’t help but notice that I’ve only used the TV as a hub once since CES 2024, and that was simply because I was reminded in the menu of its existence and wondered if it had changed since January ( this did not happen).
In truth, I’m not sure people will stop the program they’re watching to switch to the hub interface and take a multi-step action to find the device they want and activate it, when with a few swipes of a finger you can do it faster on a phone or ask your voice assistant for help. I don’t think this will make a difference for Hisense either. While integrating TVs and hubs makes sense in theory, in practice it’s not all that useful.
However, Amazon seems to have come up with a better system. Although the interface is different, all Fire TVs act as hubs thanks to Alexa integration. This seems like a much more practical integration of smart technology, as the voice assistant can be used to control the TV itself if you lose the remote, but it eliminates the need for a smart speaker in that room. The TV simply replaces the speaker.
Hisense Integration Plan
Every smart device you purchase requires an app and/or hub. Most likely, this hub only works with devices of this brand. In rare cases, such as Google, Apple and Amazon, these hubs can also integrate other brands, which is why we call them “multi-hubs.” A trend that I see developing is that more brands are trying to turn their single-brand centers into multi-centers. Brilliant, Hubspace and even Aqara allow other integrations using different connectivity technologies such as Matter, Zigbee or Z-wave.
Hisense is moving in a different direction. Their ConnectLife app will work with Hisense brands so you can manage them. However, if you want to control other brands of devices through Hisense, you can link the Hisense app to Google Home (Google Home works with almost all other brands), and through Google Home you can bring those integrations back into ConnectLife.
If you already use Google Home, this is just another integration with the app you already have, so no big deal. But if you don’t use Google Home and want to use Hisense as a multi-hub, you’ll need to download both apps. Again, you can simply download and use ConnectLife if all you want to control with it is your Hisense devices. The thing is, there seem to be integrations that allow you to control Hisense devices using Alexa or Siri. If you already use a multihub with Alexa or Siri, it makes sense to connect your Hisense devices to it rather than to the Hisense multihub on your TV or phone.
If this sounds too complicated, that’s because it is—unnecessarily. That’s why, at some level, it’s better to just let the existing multihubs handle the integration rather than try to be a multihub.
Hisense will add artificial intelligence and meal planning to refrigerators
As part of its line of smart appliances that it plans to release this year, Hisense introduced two new smart refrigerators: a giant Side-by-Side (promised to be the largest on the market) and a FreshVault French door refrigerator. These refrigerators will offer a meal planner based on artificial intelligence technology known as Dish Designer. Dish Designer, a collaboration between Microsoft and Hisense, can use your family’s preferences combined with what’s in your refrigerator to create menus. for you.
Personally, I’m really excited about being able to analyze what’s in your fridge and use those ingredients when planning your meals. Sometimes I forget what’s in my fridge, and even though I’m a good cook, I often can’t decide what I actually want to eat. These menu assistants can legitimately offer help with endless ideas. I rarely take advantage of the recipe suggestions I get from other smart appliances like the Brava Oven or Brisk It Grill , but neither of them take into account my preferences or the ingredients I have on hand if they work. Hisense promises the opposite.
An app that already makes suggestions based on my preferences and what I have is Samsung Food , which uses artificial intelligence and cameras in its refrigerator to assess what you have and make meal planning suggestions. I haven’t tested Dish Designer (which will launch sometime in the second quarter of next year) or Samsung Food (I’m looking forward to my refrigerator), but I’ve spoken to a number of people who have Samsung refrigerators with these features enabled. Most of them don’t use meal planning, and the reason seems to be that the technology isn’t very good at determining what’s in the fridge, so the recommendations aren’t accurate. A refrigerator camera can’t see everything if the refrigerator is full, food packaged in paper or plastic can’t be identified, and labels need to be turned the right way to be seen correctly. Hisense’s press release doesn’t say they’ll have cameras in the refrigerator, so I’m not sure how they’ll take into account what kind of food you have on hand.
To Hisense’s credit, the technology that will best help reduce food waste is based not on artificial intelligence but on engineering: there are vacuum-sealed boxes, adjustable container sizes, and ultra-thin foam insulation that extends the life of your ingredients. While it appears that the use of AI could lead to truly useful meal planning in the future, it appears to have fallen short of the mark so far and will only do so when it can achieve greater accuracy regarding personal tastes and supplies.
AI could make combination washing machines better
One of the highlights is the announcement of the LuxCare Mini washer-dryer combo, which promises to be fast, efficient and quiet. All-in-one machines aren’t new, but they’ve never received particularly good reviews. However, this has changed in recent years with the advent of smart combination machines from LG, GE and Samsung. These multifunctional devices allow people living in small spaces to purchase washing machines. I know three people with the new combo machines and everyone says good things about them. It is reasonable to believe that the additional AI technology added to these machines, allowing them to treat fabrics differently based on sensors, has made a significant difference in how well the machines perform in practice.
I hope Hisense surprises me
I’m glad to see any brand investing in smarter technology, but it has to make sense in practice. I love Hisense’s enthusiasm and, by the way, their TVs. I love ideas like washer/dryer combos that allow for greater affordability. I have to hope that other ideas like the TV as a hub, AI-powered meal planning, and expansion into a multihub will be implemented better here to make the results more useful than previous attempts by other brands.