IFA Berlin 2026: What We Saw, What We Doubt, What We Expect
Insight
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25 Sept 2026
Since its 2024 rebrand, IFA reads its three letters as “Innovation for All.” The letters are older than the slogan: they come from Internationale Funkausstellung, Berlin’s radio exhibition, first held in 1924. A century later, it’s where everything competing for a place in our homes shows up first.
Siniz Kim and Mai Luong from zigzag spent 7 and 8 September at the show. We weren’t there to count launches. We wanted to see how established fields are moving, what’s new, how mature the trends we already know have become, and which of it people will actually take home, use, and love.
IFA 2026 in Numbers
240,000 visitors from 155 countries and over 2,000 exhibitors, according to IFA.
Those numbers describe scale. On the floor, three themes stood out most to us: robots were everywhere, appliances wanted to be talked to, and AI was on almost every stand, often as a label on something familiar. In all three, the ambition was hard to miss, and so was the distance between a stage demo and a product someone lives with. For each theme, we’ve set out The Promise, The Catch, and Our Read: what’s on offer, what it leaves out, and what we make of it. We close with a few more observations.
Robotics: From Desktop Companions to Humanoids
The Promise
More things moved on joints than ever at a show built around home appliances, and the range was wide on every axis. In size, from desktop companions with a face and a personality to full-height humanoids. In job, from vacuums with an arm and robots that load the washing machine to mowers, pool cleaners, and window cleaners. In audience, from children and pet owners to factory floors and robot football teams.
What stood out was who brought a humanoid. Appliance makers that have sold robot vacuums for years, including LG, Haier, Midea, Xiaomi, and Dreame, also set a humanoid or humanoid-like robot on their stands, whether or not it could do much yet. The money is real, too: Unitree’s Shanghai IPO raised about $900 million just over two weeks before the show. Whoever gets this right will own a very large market.
The Catch
Walking the stands, though, we struggled to find a robot beyond cleaning that would earn a place at home. The standouts were closer to pets than assistants. Most humanoids danced, waddled, or stumbled, and drew more sympathy than admiration. The popcorn robot needed two people standing by. A humanoid set up to serve drinks couldn’t pick up a beer can without crushing it. And behind the few performing in the spotlight, most of the robots we passed were charging or resting, some sprawled flat on the floor. IFA’s own program was candid about it: on the day of its robot runway, a stage session called “Robots That Can’t Walk” noted that stage robots are “usually remote-controlled.”
Our Read
Cleaning robots are the exception for a reason: they deliver an outcome. They suit jobs where being slow doesn’t matter, and they’re worth even more where we can’t easily reach, like high windows or the inside of a pool. Humanoids aim at something much harder. The point of a human shape is to work in human spaces and take on many jobs, not one, so the bar is higher by design. They are only starting to learn those jobs, and matching an average person at any of them still looks a long way off.
Still, we wouldn’t write them off. Usefulness isn’t the only measure: humanoids are also a platform for developing the technology, and they carry an old human dream of building machines in our own image. And IFA isn’t where the frontier is: the humanoid lineup in its press releases featured Chinese makers such as Unitree, AgiBot, and EngineAI, while Tesla, Figure, 1X, and Boston Dynamics weren’t among them. At the frontier, the brain is already ahead of the body. Figure reports its robot completing more than half of its tasks in homes it had never seen. Once hands and balance catch up, convincing physical AI will arrive quickly. The open questions are when, and for what.
Appliances: Turn, Touch, and Now Talk
The Promise
Every generation of appliances has had its own sign of a smarter machine: first dials, levers, and buttons, then touchscreens, then apps, then “powered by AI.” Now that intelligence wants a voice, and voice has become the mark of a flagship. Machines that were never part of the conversation now want in: fridges, ovens, washing machines, air conditioners. LG says its new SIGNATURE fridge “understands conversational language,” and Midea says its SMART MASTER understands 140 languages without making you repeat the wake word. And voice has real uses beyond the novelty: it’s another way in when your hands are busy or messy, and when a touchscreen is hard to use at all.
The Catch
On the voice-enabled flagships we tried, voice rarely carried a real task from start to finish on its own. Sooner or later we reached for the touchscreen or the dial, and for good reason. Voice feels effortless in a demo; at home it takes more work than it looks. Anyone who has waited for the listening chime and then asked for something harder than “set a timer for five minutes” knows the feeling: you have to compose the whole request in your head before you say it. Then, halfway through, someone else in the kitchen asks you something, and the machine hears that too. Homes are shared, and not everyone wants to talk to a machine in front of others; how comfortable that feels also varies by culture. And once a task needs precise settings, saying each one aloud gets tedious where a few button presses would do.
Our Read
No single mode replaces the last one. Even the most touch-driven phone still keeps a few physical buttons. Adding voice doesn’t retire the touchscreen; the design work is making them complement each other. That leaves two questions. How does the same function work in each mode? Choosing a wash cycle by voice, by touch, or by dial takes three different designs, not one design with three inputs. And what happens when a task outgrows the mode it started in? You might start a recipe by voice and need the screen once the oven asks for exact temperatures. The hand-off should feel natural, not like starting over.
Talking to an oven won’t feel futuristic forever. Siri turns 15 this October. A bigger question is coming: if the fridge, the oven, the washer, and the air conditioner all want to talk, and all keep listening, who answers when you speak? Not every device needs to hold the conversation. One can take a middle role, orchestrating the machines that each do their own job well and moderating between them and the people at home. Smart speakers such as Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s HomePod have tried to fill it, and LG now pitches its CLOiD robot as the home’s “conductor.” We explored the same role in our early concept work on Agile Robots’ humanoid, Agile ONE, for both industrial and service settings. Which device should take it, and how the others should defer, is still unresolved. It’s a design problem before it’s a technical one.
AI: Same Story, More Context, Much More Watching
The Promise
The smart home is an old promise with a new engine. With AI, devices can understand more of what’s going on and act on their own, instead of following a schedule or a simple if-this-then-that rule. LG’s AI Home reads schedules, routines, and appliance use to suggest what to do, so people spend less time managing their machines. Haier’s new oven recognizes the food, monitors it as it cooks, and can stop the program once it’s done. And makers promise privacy, too: Anker says its MindBase hub keeps personal data from its cameras out of the cloud, and Xiaomi says facial data stays on the device.
What spread fastest was the word. AI Wash, AI Dry, AI Fresh, UltraSense AI: the label now sits on features that already existed. The press releases say what the AI senses, but rarely how much better the result is. And the label may not even help. In Washington State University experiments, simply mentioning AI in a product description lowered emotional trust and, with it, purchase intent.
Then there is the data. To understand context rather than react to simple conditions, devices need to sense much more. Cameras now sit inside washers, ovens, and fridges, and home platforms want to sense people, not only devices. Xiaomi’s vision, which stretches from the home into the car, showed both sides: richer scenarios, and a wider net of sensing behind them.
Our Read
Appliances could show their work, the way chat assistants now show the steps they took: what the machine noticed, what it changed, and by how much. How much to show depends on the case. A wash cycle might need one line; a camera deciding who is at the door needs more. Either way, it only builds trust when it’s designed into the experience, so people can judge whether the machine got it right.
The harder question is how much devices should watch in the first place. A camera in the fridge or the living room captures moments of daily life in exchange for a handful of small conveniences. Keeping the data on the device helps, but it doesn’t change how much is being watched. And the more precisely a home tries to read the situation, the more it has to know. To switch off a light without getting it wrong, it needs to know who is in which room, and whether each of them is asleep, reading, or just sitting still. If all that sensing, recording, and interpreting comes down to one light going off at the right moment, is that a fair trade? So far, the industry has treated this trade as settled instead of designing it. Designed well, it can work in people’s favor: a device that collects only what the job needs, keeps it no longer than it must, and shows what it saw is easier to welcome into the home, and easier to trust with more over time.
Also Worth Noting
A few other shifts stood out as we walked the halls.
Body extensions. We saw more exoskeletons than we expected, from specialists like Hypershell and Dnsys to newcomers from other fields, including e-scooter maker Navee and power bank maker CUKTECH.
Home energy. Battery makers had a strong presence, and not with power banks: these were home storage systems that connect to the house and the grid, often paired with balcony solar. EcoFlow, Anker, Zendure, and Bluetti all showed them.
The range of the new giants. Xiaomi has been broad for years; at IFA, Dreame and Midea looked just as broad. Dreame says it brought 100 products, and with its family of sub-brands it seemed to be in every hall. Midea’s stand ran from air conditioners to a bipedal robot.
AI meets kids and pets. Pet tech was everywhere, from self-cleaning litter boxes to feeders with cameras. There was plenty for children, too, though tools that generate content in a preset style felt more likely to narrow imagination than to open it.
Across robots, voice, and AI, the pattern was the same: the promise is running ahead of what fits into daily life. That gap is where design work sits. Part of it is function: deciding what a machine should do and what it should know about us. The other part is how it behaves and how people interact with it, finding the moments that make it worth living with.
Were you at IFA? Tell us what you saw differently. And if you’re building for the home, whether a robot, an appliance that listens, or a service that learns from the people who use it, let’s talk. These are the questions we work on at zigzag, from strategy and UX/UI design to prototypes that show an idea working in people’s hands.. Get in touch.
About the Author
Siniz Kim is Co-founder and Partner at zigzag. He wrote this with Claude, which handled the research and fact-checking. The two wrestled over nearly every sentence; he won most rounds and had the last word.
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