As Artificial Intelligence (AI) accelerates its integration into various terminals such as smartphones, smart glasses, and robots, home appliances, serving as high-frequency terminals in household life, have also become a crucial scenario for the accelerated implementation of AI.
At the first Immersive Consumption Carnival and the 2026 AI Terminal Innovation and Development Conference held last week in Yizhuang, Beijing, over 500 products were showcased in the AI Terminal Industry Chain Innovation Achievement Exhibition Area. In the "Relax Your Life" exhibition zone, Haier introduced the Seeker series, demonstrating the experience revolution brought by AI to traditional home appliances. This allows people to deeply feel that AI terminals are moving further from mere technologies and parameters into perceptible and experiential daily life scenarios.
From Executing Commands to Proactive Services
For a long time in the past, the main interaction logic of smart home appliances was built on internet connectivity, remote control, and voice commands. Users issued commands, and devices executed them according to predetermined programs. As sensing technologies, large models, and AI agent technologies gradually enter household terminals, home appliances are beginning to possess the ability to understand environments, identify needs, and respond autonomously.
"The Seeker series features five major AI agent capabilities: self-identification, self-learning, self-decision-making, self-interaction, and self-execution. These capabilities can enhance the convenience of users' home life and provide decision-making support when users encounter problems," said Feng Shuoli, Marketing Director of Haier Smart Home Beijing Branch, in an interview with a reporter from China Electronics News.
These five capabilities are not isolated from each other; instead, they collectively point to an intelligent service path that ranges from perceiving the environment and understanding needs to making autonomous judgments and completing operations. Equipped with technologies such as AI Eye 2.0, the Haier Seeker series can incorporate visual, voice, and environmental information into the perception and decision-making processes of home appliances, providing proactive services following the path of "perception-interaction-decision-execution."
Specifically in household chores, AI is beginning to participate in tasks that originally required continuous attention and operation from users. Refrigerators can identify internal ingredients and record relevant information; washing machines can recognize the status of clothes, handling or alerting users to issues such as excessive foam, clothes getting stuck, or missed retrieval; air conditioners analyze seasons, regions, indoor temperature and humidity, and air quality in real time, automatically adjusting operation modes; water heaters can remember the preferred temperatures and water usage times of all family members, automatically preparing hot water every day; range hoods and stoves can monitor smoke and heat levels, adjusting their operating status accordingly; after identifying ingredients, steaming and baking ovens can further match cooking temperatures and times; televisions can perceive people's positions and states, pausing when someone leaves, resuming when they return, turning off after a long absence, and providing close-range visual protection reminders.
The resulting change is that the starting point of home appliance operations is shifting forward. Users no longer need to set up and continuously check every step individually. Devices are beginning to autonomously complete some judgments and operations by perceiving the real environment, saving users time and effort.
From Single Home Appliances to Household Scenarios
After AI enters home appliances, the changes do not only occur on single devices. Besides making individual devices smarter, collaborative operations among different devices are also a crucial direction for the evolution of home appliances.
In kitchen scenarios, the Seeker gas stove supports linkage between the range hood and the stove. After the stove is ignited, the range hood starts synchronously, and after the stove is turned off, the range hood continues to run with a 3-minute delay, linking the ignition and exhaust processes that originally required separate operations. In addition to direct linkage between devices, some terminals are also beginning to take on the centralized management function for whole-house devices. The Seeker 85V80D TV sets up a "Whole-House Smart Control Center," supporting the access of massive devices and enabling operations such as smart security, ingredient management, and cleanliness management.
For smart homes, increasing the number of devices is not the ultimate goal. The key to further implementing full-scenario intelligence lies in how to truly connect the information and capabilities acquired by terminals such as refrigerators, kitchen appliances, and televisions. Taking "preparing a dinner" as an example: after the refrigerator identifies the ingredient inventory, it proactively pushes matching recipes to the television; the stove automatically sets the heat level according to the recipe; and the range hood synchronously adjusts the air volume. The devices collaborate spontaneously around the same scenario rather than waiting for individual commands.
Behind this is the deep integration of cloud algorithms and terminal perception, which further tests manufacturers' capabilities in connecting data, ecosystems, and scenarios. Only in this way can smart homes truly advance from being "controllable" to "understanding life."
AI Home Appliances Must Still Return to Real Experiences
While AI capabilities are continuously strengthening, how to judge exactly how "smart" a home appliance is has also become an issue of industry concern. The Haier Seeker series has obtained the L4-level smart home appliance standard certification certificate issued by CHEARI (Beijing) Testing and Certification Co., Ltd. Under this certification system, the intelligent capabilities of the Seeker series are further extended from basic functions such as internet control and voice interaction to proactive learning, multi-scenario perception, autonomous decision-making, and cross-scenario linkage.
Beyond the levels, for consumers, the standard to judge whether a technology is truly valuable ultimately remains very specific: whether it can reduce tedious operations, solve real problems, and make household chores more worry-free. This is precisely the real test that AI must undergo after moving from screens to daily terminals such as refrigerators, washing machines, and range hoods.
Feng Shuoli believes that the proactive service capabilities of home appliances will continue to improve in the coming years.
"In the future, Haier will focus on advancing the learning capabilities of home appliances, timely perception of the environment, and prompt responses to problem decision-making in the fields of AI terminals and smart homes, making Haier home appliance services more efficient and accurate, and enhancing the user experience," she said. "In the future, more home appliances will be like the Haier Seeker, with higher intelligence levels, capable of proactively discovering needs, making autonomous decisions and executions, understanding your life behaviors, predicting your needs, and proactively completing household chores."
Truly understanding diverse household scenarios, collaboratively processing non-standardized tasks, and allowing users to worry less and feel more at ease are not only the core expectations of consumers for AI home appliances but also the forward direction for AI home appliances in the next stage.
Authors | Qi Xu, Hu Xiuqing (Intern)
Editor | Zhang Xinyi
Art Designer | Ma Liya Supervisor | Lian Xiaodong