The Breaker Times

After years of being on the fringes of home automation, LG is now making a big play in the smart home. It has a shiny new multi-protocol hub, is opening its ThinQ platform to work with more smart home devices, and will soon allow other platforms to integrate its appliances into their ecosystems.

ThinQ’s shift from being solely an app to control LG appliances and electronics to becoming a competitor to smart home platforms like Samsung’s SmartThings and Apple Home has been spurred by the standardization of smart home connectivity through initiatives like Thread and Matter and the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

“Until now, the smart home was all about the connectivity of smart devices, but with the emergence of generative AI, it’s time to move to the next chapter,” LG’s chief engineer of smart home, Daejong Kang, told The Verge in an interview. “Until now, we’ve been talking about technical readiness. Now, we are ready to provide solutions.”

Kang says its new ThinQ ON hub will power these solutions using voice control and generative AI. With Matter, Thread, Zigbee, and Wi-Fi connectivity on board, the new hub is also a smart speaker with a built-in voice assistant called the AI Agent. The voice assistant is just in the hub for now, but Kang said it will come to more LG appliances.

Powered by LG’s artificial intelligence, which it calls “Affectionate Intelligence,” the AI Agent should be able to learn from your usage patterns, monitor your appliances, and allow for voice control of connected devices.

“It can understand the circumstances in the home and control things depending on your condition and living style,” says Kang. “For example, if it starts to get too warm in your home, it can understand conditions in the home and automatically control the temperature and fan speed.”

Adjusting climate automatically based on sensors is something you can do today with smart home automations. But LG is adding a level of autonomy here, allowing the AI Agent to control your home’s climate based on what it knows about your home and your preferences, along with what it thinks is best. An autonomous AI Agent in the home is ambitious, not to mention potentially creepy. It will be interesting to see if LG can pull this off.

At the IFA tech show in Berlin this month, LG demoed several scenarios in which the AI Agent automatically controlled the home environment, most of which relied on LG appliances. However, Kang says the company is opening up the platform to more products to “layer experiences over connectivity” and provide more value to its customers.

It’s this new, more open approach from LG that really caught my attention. Home appliances are a large missing piece of the smart home puzzle. Manufacturers have been sticking Wi-Fi chips in them for a decade, but few have done much with the technology beyond remote diagnostics and some remote control. Most are siloed in manufacturer apps with limited interaction with anything else in your home.

With its new hub, LG is integrating other smart home devices into its ecosystem to work alongside its appliances (something Samsung has already done with SmartThings). However, it’s also planning to allow its appliances to work in other ecosystems, something Samsung has not allowed so far. This should allow users to integrate their appliances into their smart home however they want.

LG’s new hub is central to these ambitions. As a Matter controller and Thread border router that also supports Zigbee (but not Z-Wave), the ThinQ ON will be capable of supporting hundreds of devices — from smart locks and lights to robot vacuums, smart sensors, and plugs. These will all then be controllable through LG’s ThinQ app.

The hub and app also have a new operating system to manage and control these devices. The good news is LG isn’t building its own. Instead, it bought a well-established one. Earlier this year, LG acquired a majority stake in Athom, and Kang says they have already ported Athom’s Homey OS to the ThinQ ON.

Homey is a powerful smart home platform with its own hub that integrates with hundreds of manufacturers and services. Many of these integrations will come to ThinQ, says Kang. This includes support for integration with devices from manufacturers like Aqara, Philips Hue, Ecobee, Eve, Nanoleaf, Sonos, TP-Link, and more. Kang didn’t share a timeline for when these integrations will go live but said the hub should arrive in the US and Europe next year.

In addition to incorporating third-party smart home devices into its smart home solution, LG plans to allow other platforms to integrate LG appliances. “Later this year, we will open our APIs to control LG appliances and support an SDK for other companies to connect to our appliances,” says Kang.

This could allow platforms like Home Assistant to integrate LG’s connected appliances, including washers and dryers, vacuums, refrigerators, ovens, dishwashers, induction cooktops, and AC units. LG did announce a partnership with Samsung through the Home Connectivity Alliance to control its appliances in SmartThings and vice versa, but that hasn’t materialized yet.

Interestingly, while LG is opening its APIs and providing SDKs for other ecosystems to connect its smart appliances to their platforms, Kang says they have yet to decide if they will make them Matter devices. “We are considering it; the Matter standard is really good, but due to the certification process of Matter, it is a lot of money [to certify all LG’s devices], and it’s really, really slow,” says Kang.

Eagle-eyed LG watchers will recall that the company announced it was putting Google Home Hub capability into its televisions, allowing you to use an LG TV as a Matter controller for Google Home. While that is still the plan, Kang says the Google Home integration is one more option for users but that the ThinQ ON hub is the best route if you want to use LG’s services with its appliances. Google Home hub support is slated for LG’s 2025 TVs.

LG has been dabbling in home automation for years but has never presented a cohesive solution for users to control their appliances alongside the rest of their smart home. If it pulls off the transformation of the ThinQ platform powered by Homey, it will essentially do what Samsung did when it purchased SmartThings a decade ago — create an open smart home platform that integrates with its home appliances. This could position LG as a major competitor to Apple, Amazon, and Google in the smart home.

Based on its track record in this space, I’m not convinced LG will actually follow through on all these promises. But I’d like to be proven wrong.