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It can sort your dirty and clean clothes before washing and after drying, based on your preferences.
It defaults to common sense things like washing similar materials and weights, keeping delicates in their own load, grouping sensitive colors like red.
But why it calls home and why we have to create accounts to just get a notification.
Or a bomb.. "let there be light"
a) Have it display advertising on a screen on its front size (like some fridges now)
b) Only work with approved laundry pods
c) Other new revenue generating opportunities for its manufacturer
and the washer now knows what to do. No more temp, length, 2nd rinse proxy controls.
Washlexa:”Sorry, you were right I was supposed to use regular programme, but I used wrong one, do you want me to wash them again?”
I had also seen Frankie Boyle in his parody of Knight Rider: "Michael, I am Kitt, your car, stop taking the medications, they want you to take them so you will be unable to talk to me"...
I believe there is a lot we can improve in washing machines
Imagine an energy efficient IC for a small multimodal model that can do voice to text, text to speech, question/answer, tool calling, and structured output.
Wire that up to a microcontroller that parses the structured output to constrain the model (rather than giving the model direct hardware access).
Now you have an assistive tech mode for supporting vision impaired users without requiring them to configure an app on their phone, pair devices, etc. And so now the user can just speak to the washing machine to tell it what to do.
And because models are getting better and better at multi-language support, you can rely on a single model to cover a wide range of spoken languages. And therefore you don't need a bunch of variants of this chip for a single product line.
TLDR this gives a path to replace "always online" and "wifi enabled" devices with fully on-device capabilities without being forced to abandon assistive technology support.
IMHO the only reason there's not been pushback from the EU already is because so much assistive tech is only possible with wireless connectivity currently. Once privacy conscious assistive tech is viable those crackdowns will probably be on the horizon even if only for the security risk associated with millions of internet connected devices with poor security posture.