TIANJIN, April 7 (Xinhua) -- Before a family gets home, their car has already spoken to the house. This means that when they arrive at their house, the air-conditioner is on and the air purifier is running.

Once in the kitchen, AI glasses identify ingredients, read the heat of the stove and tell the cook when to add salt or turn over the food. Meanwhile, a robot vacuum cleaner shifts clutter before cleaning around it.

In China, such scenes are no longer science fiction. They are becoming ordinary.

This means smart homes are now more than just a consumer-tech novelty. In China, they are increasingly becoming a commercial proving ground for AI, as manufacturers employ this technology in high-frequency domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning and home management. The point is not merely to make appliances smarter, but to turn intelligence into a stronger selling point and a new source of momentum for the industry.

The most commercially promising uses of AI are often the most routine. Since cooking and cleaning are daily tasks, even small improvements in convenience are easy to notice, and easier to sell.

Robam, a kitchen appliance industry leader in China, has launched what it calls the Culinary Master AI Mega Model, which is tailored to cooking. Tell it what you have in your fridge, and it will recommend recipes while linking with digital kitchen appliances, including automatic stove adjustment. Its AI cooking glasses can recognize ingredients, sense the heat of the stove, and prompt the user in real time.

As He Yadong, vice president of the company, put it, cooking is both high-frequency and essential, giving it particular promise for human-machine interaction and vertical large-model applications.

Cleaning robots are moving in the same direction. Roborock, for example, has tried to solve one of this category's oldest frustrations, namely obstacle avoidance, doing so by giving its machines "hands and feet." One model uses a five-axis foldable bionic mechanical arm to move obstacles and tidy clutter, while another adopts a dual-wheel leg structure to tackle more complex terrain.

This helps explain why "smart" has become such a strong sales pitch. Data have shown that the penetration rate of AI home appliances in China had exceeded 50 percent in 2025. In televisions, it passed 70 percent, and in cleaning appliances and washing machines it rose above 50 percent. Intelligence is no longer a niche embellishment but has become part of the industry's mainstream commercial language.

The bigger shift is from single products to connected systems. China's home appliance giant Haier Group's smart home brain combines AI, the Internet of Things and large-model technology to make home services less reactive and more proactive. An air-conditioner can switch on fresh-air functions according to indoor conditions. A washing machine can identify fabric types and choose the right program. These machines no longer wait to be told. They begin to read the room.

The same logic is spilling into cars. According to a white paper from Dongchedi, an automobile information, trading and services platform also known as DCar, 81.2 percent of fuel-car consumers replacing their vehicles say their first choice is a new energy model, as they are drawn by advances in autonomous driving and intelligent cockpits.

Chinese firms are also trying to explore wider market opportunities overseas. In appliance stores in Berlin, brands such as Roborock and Dreame occupy prominent positions in the robot vacuum section. Market researcher International Data Corporation said global shipments of home cleaning robots had reached 32.72 million in 2025, up 20.1 percent from a year earlier, while shipments of robot vacuums rose 17.1 percent to 24.12 million.

The world's top five cleaning-robot manufacturers by sales were all Chinese: Roborock, Ecovacs, Dreame, Xiaomi and Narwal. Their edge, as industry insiders observed, lies not only in price but in rapid iteration and increasingly localized design. Companies are adapting products to different markets and moving into niches such as lawn-mowing and pool robots. Dreame, for example, is localizing not just products but design, marketing, sales and after-sales service.

Yet such success is not evenly spread. Outside a handful of strong niches, CCID Consulting under China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said that many Chinese smart-home firms going abroad still rely on Original Equipment Manufacturer arrangements and have yet to build much brand recognition.

Shi Lingzhi, head of the AI innovation center at Beijing Winicssec Technology Co., Ltd., warns that some smart home products carry risks of data leakage, privacy breaches and weak software stability. Yet such risks may ease as safety standards are rolled out, and the market becomes more regulated, Shi noted. For consumers, this makes trusted brands and formal sales channels more important.

The sector's future will depend less on flashy functions than on whether firms can keep innovation grounded in real demand. More broadly, the integration of AI and smart homes is not about replacing people, but about enabling them to do more. "AI's mission is to fulfill your every act of creation, not to replace you," He Yadong said. ■