LG Electronics and Italian furniture giant Natuzzi are making a joint bet on the Internet of Things segment, the duo announced earlier this month. The two companies are developing a smart home bundle meant to include a wide variety of IoT technologies and furniture, with the offering being touted as the ultimate solution for outfitting a contemporary Internet-enabled household. The first results of the initiative that Natuzzi Italia is referring to as the “smart living programme” are presently being showcased at the Milano Design Week which started yesterday and is running until Sunday, April 22. Among other things, the firms are using the Milan event as an opportunity to publicly demonstrate a connected version of Mauro Lipparini’s Colosseo sofa capable of communicating with everything from TVs and lights to air purifiers and appliances.
The current version of the solution is already highly automated in nature and supports voice commands, in addition to being controllable via an Android app for LG’s smartphones, the partners said. In practice, the platform allows you to e.g. sit on a sofa and tell it to turn on the TV, purify the air in the room, turn on the lights, or perform any combination of such actions. The TV demonstrated as supporting the newly announced smart home experience is LG’s latest Signature OLED model.
The Santeramo in Colle, Italy-based furniture company is expecting to continue collaborating with LG moving forward, though it’s presently unclear how close the first result of their partnership is to being commercialized. LG itself has recently been pursuing smart home innovation across the board and has also been embracing third-party solutions, particularly in the context of artificial intelligence assistants given how it’s presently one of the few major electronics companies that support both Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant, seeking to provide consumers with more options by not locking them into a single AI ecosystem based on their appliances of choice.