Have you ever all the time needed to scan your groceries at dwelling? If that’s the case, the latest good fridge from GE Home equipment is for you. There’s a barcode scanner constructed into the water dispenser that works together with an inside digicam and an 8-inch pill that will help you maintain observe of what meals you want and add it to your digital purchasing record.
The GE Profile Smart 4-Door French-Door Refrigerator with Kitchen Assistant is being introduced at CES 2026, which kicks off subsequent week, and is slated to launch in April for $4,899 — $500 greater than a comparable non-Kitchen Assistant mannequin.
That is GE’s first fridge with a full pill inbuilt, however not its first equipment with one — that accolade goes to GE’s Kitchen Hub, which was an enormous 27-inch pill connected to an over-the-range microwave.
The corporate says this time they need to use the expertise to deal with particular ache factors, similar to sustaining your purchasing record, meal planning, and managing meals waste. “We’re integrating very purposeful expertise into the product,” Amy Hite, product supervisor with GE Home equipment, informed The Verge. “We didn’t simply put an iPad on the entrance of the door.”
The novel function right here is the built-in scanner, located under the pill and above the water dispenser. The concept is that you just scan your empty packages as you’re taking them out of the fridge or pantry. This provides them to your purchasing record in GE’s SmartHQ App — full with model, taste, and measurement — ideally making it simpler to construct your purchasing record.
You can too manually add objects by way of the 8-inch contact display screen, which, by being built-in into the water dispenser space, seems much less apparent than these on different manufacturers. An alternative choice is the brand new built-in voice assistant, “Hey, HQ.” The display screen additionally offers entry to recipes from Taste of Home and a meal-planning function, and you may add elements you want from a recipe to your record with a couple of faucets.
A digicam contained in the fridge displays your crisper drawer, letting you verify from the shop by way of the app when you’re working low on spinach. It’s built-in right into a flush-mount LED bar above the doorways and has a bodily shutter.
Picture: GE Home equipment
As soon as your record is prepared, you may order your groceries by Instacart within the app, verify off objects whereas within the retailer, or export the record as a PDF. “The aim right here is to not try to maintain a listing record of what’s contained in the fridge however to truly permit simple purchasing for you,” says Hite.
The corporate plans so as to add AI-powered object monitoring to the digicam to allow extra exact meals monitoring — a function Samsung’s Family Hub smart fridges already offer. “AI imaginative and prescient is the longer term right here,” says Hite. “There’s a actual drawback with meals waste, so we are attempting to resolve for that by serving to you already know what you’ve, so that you don’t purchase duplicates.”
The SmartHQ voice assistant is one other first for GE Home equipment. Along with including objects to your purchasing record, it could possibly deal with duties like kitchen timers, allotting a exact quantity of water, and answering questions concerning the fridge, similar to “How do I alter my water filter?”
HQ doesn’t speak again; as an alternative, it solutions any questions on the display screen. Nevertheless, there’s a speaker within the fridge, together with a microphone, that you should use to stream music and podcasts.
“The voice management function fills the gaps which are tough to get to with our Alexa and Google assistants integrations,” explains Justin Brown, director of Digital Product Administration at GE Home equipment. He says it will likely be obtainable on different home equipment sooner or later.
There are several apps, services, and good audio system that may do some or all the above, however having all these capabilities built-in into one equipment — the fridge — and accessible to everybody within the family holds some enchantment. Nevertheless, being locked into one producer’s ecosystem and app feels restrictive, particularly for meal planning. And my experiences with the SmartHQ app to date haven’t been nice.
There’s additionally the very actual concern round having a pill constructed into your fridge that may cease getting updates or break lengthy earlier than your fridge does. Nevertheless, sticking tablets into home equipment isn’t a development that’s going away anytime quickly. Hisense simply announced a line of fridges and ovens with touchscreens that may also be at CES, and Samsung’s newest home equipment all feature 7-inch or larger tablets.
The opposite concern is that after firms have screens in your house, they’ll begin pushing adverts at you, one thing Samsung has already done. The trade-off between the comfort these interfaces carry, and the shortage of management you in the end have over them, is one thing we’ll be watching carefully.