Dreaming of a Self-Driving Home Office

As I write this, 2 stories boss the news, though I await the headlines to head elsewhere by the time y'all read it. The first story is the Powerball lottery is soaring past $900 one thousand thousand as it's long overdue for someone to buy a winning ticket and reset the jackpot. If it's me, PCMag volition be replacing this home role cavalcade with a palatial function column with topics such as "Tips for Cleaning Your Gold-Plated Router," "Getting Improve Performance from the Servant Who Refills Your Printer," and "Can You Beget an Apple Watch?"

The other newsmaker is CES, the behemothic consumer technology prove that took place final calendar week in Las Vegas. It was a week-long frenzy of gadgets and gizmos where more than 3,600 companies gathered to innovate 20,000 products. And some products not really introduced at CES made the news also. For case, I saw several articles about the Babypod, a tampon-mode speaker that plugs into a smartphone; an expectant mother can use information technology to serenade her unborn babe with music.

Equally you know, even if you weren't post-obit the news from Vegas, information technology was all about smart this, connected that, and the Internet of Things (IoT) nowadays. The My UV Patch, from beauty company Fifty'Oreal, is a 1-inch square of adhesive that sticks on your skin and changes colors when exposed to ultraviolet rays. I could see the product pitch ending there simply no: you lot can snap a photo of the patch and upload information technology to a mobile app to run across if you lot're at hazard for sunburn.

Ford announced that Alexa, the Amazon Repeat'south member of Siri and Cortana's chatty sorority, will be coming to car dashboards, so yous can tell your Repeat to outset and warm upward your vehicle on a cold morning time or tell your auto to open the garage door as you near dwelling house.

Don't know whether you need to buy milk? Standing in the grocery store, you lot can bank check the Smarter Fridge Cam's nigh recent picture show of the inside of your icebox. Want to tell your spouse to quit putting the empty milk carton back in the fridge? Go out a note on the 21.5-inch screen of Samsung's Family Hub Refrigerator. Not certain whether you'll need that Babypod mentioned before? Get-go Response's Pregnancy Pro connects a pregnancy test stick to a smartphone app via Bluetooth.

Unfortunately, the watchword for these and other headliners is convenience (or maybe tech-demented luxury) as opposed to the watchword of a domicile office worker, which is productivity. Relatively speaking, I was dismayed how little home office gear there was at CES.

HP and Lenovo, with versions of the Spectre x360 and ThinkPad X1 Yoga respectively coming this spring, will make you lot wish your next laptop had an OLED display. Lenovo scored again with the Yoga 900S, a flip-and-fold convertible that's thinner (0.5 inch) and lighter (2.ii pounds) than almost any non-convertible laptop. There were plenty of drool-worthy systems for hardcore gamers. Merely there was little of the tech that I fantasize most.

The Democratic Home Office

You see, I don't especially want a self-driving or democratic motorcar. I want an autonomous home office. Such an office would be 1 that works with you, that anticipates your needs to save time and boost productivity. Its printer would sense when information technology was running low on ink or toner and use the Internet to gild more delivered to your door on a just-in-fourth dimension basis—would do, in brusk, what HP'south Instant Ink

models do, although HP needs to add a higher-book Pro tier to its Instant Ink subscriptions for home users who don't print many pages per month.

Its computer would monitor its own health and offer proactive solutions, warning y'all that a hard bulldoze failure was imminent or that a retention module needed replacing. This is the idea behind Dell'due south ProSupport Plus for business organization client systems, which uses a Windows 8.1/10 utility chosen SupportAssist to monitor, discover issues, and notify users or IT managers, with predictive analysis for hard drive and battery failures.

It would take what Marking Zuckerberg says he's going to build this year—an artificial intelligence (AI) butler similar Jarvis from Iron Human being (but without the taking-blue-humanoid-form-and-donning-a-cape function) that can respond to phonation commands. It could cheque my schedule, take a letter, or gently wake me. I would add the ultimate synthesis of smart calendar, to-exercise, email, and client relationship management (CRM) software, with everything from OS X's Reminders to the Timeful applied science Google acquired for Gmail—which lets you schedule imprecise tasks such as plumbing equipment in three trips to the gym in a week.

Finally, the whole office would fold up like an armoire or Murphy bed, turning workspace dorsum into abode infinite at the terminate of the day. One brandish of CES honorees included the $350 Hub27 from ErgotronHome, a wall-mounted unit of measurement with a glass front end for whiteboard notes that flips down into a small-scale standing desk for a laptop or tablet.

What are your favorite dwelling house office timesavers? What's on your wish listing for tools that would hike your productivity? Will telecommuters resist the temptation of TV only to find themselves watching the refrigerator all day? Share in the comments below or at homeoffice.eric@gmail.com.