LAS VEGAS (AFP) – You’re at work should you get word of unexpected dinner guests. No problem. Smart appliances to the rescue.

In a worldwide made possible by innovations unveiled this week on the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, it’s worthwhile to whip out your smartphone in your bus or train ride home.

You use the virtual joystick to guide your camera-equipped vacuum robot round the lounge, activating the speaker to inform the dog to get off the couch.

You switch to the appliance in your phone which lets you check recipes against the contents of your refrigerator, which sends you a text message telling you you’re out of milk.

Once you’ve decided what you are going to cook, you inform your refrigerator, which tells the oven to start pre-heating in accordance with the recipe you’ve selected.

Floor-cleaning robots, refrigerators and ovens on display on the annual CES gadget fest can do all the above — and more.

“Smart appliances, while they have been style of a pipe dream for the last couple of years, are really becoming a reality,” said John Taylor, vp of LG Electronics USA.

South Korea’s LG is a pace-setter inside the field, which not just involves building Wi-Fi connectivity into appliances so they can communicate but in addition using real-time energy monitoring to save lots of on electricity bills.

“Last year there have been plenty of questions on when (smart appliances) are coming,” said Kevin Messner, vice chairman of the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers.

“The progress we’ve remodeled the last year on smart appliances from where we were last year at CES to where we’re today is solely staggering,” he said.

A refrigerator on the LG booth at CES has a touchscreen built into front with a “food manager” function that offers a listing of what is inside, where items can be found — orange juice, left door — and expiration dates.

You compile the inventory of what is on your refrigerator by taking a photograph of your receipt from the grocer along with your smartphone and sending it for your fridge, or by scanning the barcode of every item individually.

A refrigerator being offered by LG rival Samsung allows you to shop from select stores by dragging and dropping icons of varied items — apples or eggs, for instance — on a touchscreen and having the groceries brought to your door.

That service is currently only available in South Korea.

A floor-cleaning robot from LG has not one but three cameras and yes, you are able to call it out of your smartphone and tell the dog to get off the furniture.

Warwick Stirling, global manager of energy and sustainability for Whirlpool, said smart appliances are only portion of what’s referred to as the “connected home.”

“I see it as making household chores simpler, simplifying your life,” Stirling said. “i do not believe it’s being Facebook friends along with your fridge. And that i do not believe it’s about surfing Facebook out of your fridge.”

“i believe it’s in its infancy,” Stirling added of the era of smart appliances. “i believe it’ll become real this year and it is going to get bigger and greater and greater over the years.”

Taylor said that while LG is “really bullish in regards to the way forward for smart appliances,” they’re dearer and are “not at all going to be the vast majority of products in the stores” for your time to return.

“There’s a certain level of consumer who wants the most recent and greatest and could be attracted by a few of the new smart features,” he said.

Jon Van Dore, senior product development manager for China’s Haier, said rapidly changing technology poses a specific challenge for home appliance manufacturers, whose products are intended to last for a very long time.

“Technology has a life span of 1 to 2 years,” Van Dore said, holding up his cellphone. “We have now a life span of 10 to twenty years.”

Wi-Fi connectivity and intelligent machines could be the wave of the long run, Van Dore said, but he cited the cautionary tale of a rival appliance manufacturer who built a screen right into a refrigerator a decade ago.

“It became obsolete in six months,” he said. “It’s still a superb refrigerator but now it has got this old technology stuck to it.”