It was impossible to escape artificial intelligence (AI) at the world’s biggest technology fair in Las Vegas, which saw a record 14,00 start-ups exhibiting this year and 135,000 attendees from across the globe.

From kitchenware to pet tech, these are all the weird and wonderful ways that AI wowed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) last week.

The AI bin

Italian start-up Ganiga displayed a bin that uses AI to recognise the type of waste put into it via a camera. It is then disposed of in the right bin.

The smart bin, named Hoooly, “maximises the recycling system” and can also record data on waste composition so that it can create a personalised profile of waste habits,” Nicolas Lorenzo Zeoli, Ganiga CEO and co-founder told Euronews Next.

The smart bin, which resembles a rocket, can even create an optimised route of where to empty the bin.

There is an indoor and outdoor version of the bin and they come in different sizes. The cost for the moment is around €4,000, which the company hopes to bring down as the company expands.

The HR assistant

The French start-up Obo-World has a virtual human resources assistant that can cut the time required to screen candidates for jobs.

The company says it is not replacing HR recruiters but saving them 80 per cent of the time when hiring as the virtual assistant screens candidates for the jobs.

“Sourcing candidates to see if they are interested in the job, have the right qualifications and checking to see if they live in the same district and even if they are still looking for a new job takes up a lot of time,” CEO and founder Mathieu Masclez told Euronews Next.

Obo, the sweet-looking, gender-neutral virtual agent, scans through CVs to create a scoreboard of the candidates that fit the job criteria within a matter of minutes.

It then tells the real-life recruiter which are the best candidates. The prospective employee then receives an email with an invite for an interview with Obo, which asks the same questions, such as location and other basic questions, to each candidate.

The real-life recruiter will later interview candidates and can jump in at any time to take control of the application process.

AI has been slammed for having biases, which is especially harmful when recruiting for a job.

However, Obo does not work with algorithms. The CV, photo, person’s address, and age are details that are blurred until the candidate meets the interviewer.

“We have a tool that’s hyper-inclusive,” said Masclez.

“In the end, it’s a human who’s going to recruit. If a man doesn’t like women, a woman who doesn’t like men, who doesn’t like black, white, or green people there’s nothing we can do about it, it’s the human who validates the candidate at the end”.

The pet health detector

Taking the idea of a smartwatch, Invoxia released a gadget to make dog and cat collars smarter. It can measure the health and activity of your pet. It fixes onto any existing collar and weighs just 36 grams.

The gadget, called Minitailz, detects how much your pet is sleeping, running, walking, eating, drinking, and even barking.

It also measures your pet’s breath rate and heart rate, which are vital to a health reading, the company’s CEO Clement Moreau told Euronews Next.

That data can then be read via the app, which can also send you alerts and tell you where your pet is.

AI is used in the conversational generative AI agent that can create personalised pet reports and answer questions about the animal.

Moreau said AI is also used to help analyse your cat’s or dog’s movements and heart rate.

The human health monitor

The Canadian company NuraLogix says it can measure your health in a selfie that takes 30 seconds. It uses emotion AI, meaning it can read your feelings, to recognise physiological and psychological biomarkers.

The data collected, which can measure your heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure, can then give you information on your risk of diabetes, heart attack stroke, and even your skin age.

The AI Pillow

To reduce snoring, Motion Pillow can distinguish snores from other noise disturbances and even recognise different types of snore frequencies.

It works by then gently inflating the memory foam pillow so that you move your head and stop snoring because snoring is caused by sleeping in a position where your airwaves are blocked.

It is operated via an app so that you can adjust the settings as well as give you the data of how long you snored. It can even play back a recording of the snoring so that you get an insight into what your partner puts up with. 

The AI that gets you

The French deep-tech company Ontbo also uses emotion AI. The technology understands human emotion by using four different types of sensors such as how the person sounds, their expressions, and how they write.

“Companies are increasingly using artificial intelligence to manage customer relations. But computers don’t understand us and human relationships,” Dr Stephane Aubry, Ontbo’s technical director, told Euronews Next.

He said the company is targeting the banking, retail, sports, and automotive sectors and highlighted how in marketing, adverts shown to focus groups could be more accurate as it would show how a person feels rather than going by what they say they feel.

Technology like this that can get into your head does sound rather scary but the company says it has a strict ethics code and complies with all regulations. It also keeps all data in France and complies with GDPR.