Content
Skip to Main ContentAccessibility Help
Spark

Forget The Jetsons! The new generation of home robots are still mostly useless

If a robot could fold your clothes, but it took twice as long, would you still buy it? Vendors at the Consumer Electronics Show think so.
CBC Radio ·
Debbie Cohen-Abravanel, CMO at FoldiMate, takes folded clothing from a FoldiMate automatic folding machine. Taylor Lorenz thinks the laundry robot isn't quite ready for prime time. (Steve Marcus/Reuters)

Rosie the Robot, they ain't! This year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, N.V. offered the world a glimpse into the future. Voice control for everything, robot companions that will make Rufus jealous and magical machines that will automate all the tasks we hate doing.

Taylor Lorenz is a technology and culture reporter for The Daily Beast. (Supplied)
But, according The Daily Beast's Taylor Lorenz, those machines aren't quite ready yet. 

"I was taken aback by the number of things that just didn't work," she said. "There [were] a lot of products that you could the concept was interesting, but the execution was just super sub-par."

She wrote about these "sub-par" machines in a story for The Daily Beast. Among them: ehe FoldiMate.

It's a machine the size of your washer and it'll fold your clothes. Sounds great, right? Probably not. Turns out you have to feed each piece into the machine manually and Taylor says it's hardly worth it.

That's just one example from this year's CES. To hear more about the "useless robots" at CES, listen to our interview with Taylor in the player below.

More from this episode