In the wake of the closure of Apple's autonomous car division (Project Titan) this week, one questions if Steve Jobs' axiom still holds true. "Some people say, 'Give the customers what they want.' Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do," declared Jobs and continued with an analogy, "I think Henry Ford once said, 'If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'a faster horse!'" Titan joins a growing graveyard of autonomous innovations, which is filled with the tombstones of Baxter, Jibo, Kuri and many broken quadcopters. If anything holds true, not every founder is Steve Jobs or Henry Ford and listening to public sentiment could be a bellwether for success. Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley announced on January 9, 2019 from the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) floor, "It's official. It's the timing… the telemetry of adoption for L5 cars without safety drivers expected by many investors may be too aggressive by a decade… possibly decades."

Simplehuman is one of those companies whose products are simple in appearance and form factor, but the practical uses of their items will make you want to take a look in the mirror and say "why don't I have this?" And speaking of mirrors, they have two new ones. Simplehuman has announced two new smart mirrors, the Sensor Mirror Hi-Fi and the Sensor Mirror Hi-Fi Assist. "We successfully designed our first generation of mirrors by creating the best, most color-correct view," said simplehuman CEO and Founder Frank Yang. "The new Sensor Mirror Hi-Fi and Sensor Mirror Hi-Fi Assist models dramatically raise the bar by combining our tru-lux light with superb audio to enhance your morning routine -- from makeup application to listening to your favorite music, our next generation of mirrors were developed to revolutionize your morning routine."

For a company famous for its analog trash cans, soap dispensers and toilet plungers, Simplehuman is embracing a digital future. The company has returned to this particular consumer electronics show to show off a new pedestal mirror that includes Google's voice assistant. As well as Assistant integration, the mirror will pull double duty as a Bluetooth and AirPlay 2 speaker for your home. Simplehuman boasts that the device packs a "custom, Danish-designed 2.5-inch acoustic driver" to deliver room-filling sound. Walk toward the mirror, too, and the built-in tru-lux bulbs will automatically replicate daylight in the morning, but offer dusky hues in the evening. It's certainly been possible to get voice assistants baked into mirrors before, especially if you knew your way around a Raspberry Pi.

Add in the latest smart wireless headphones--Apple's expected next-generation AirPods or competing ones from Bose or Shure--along with talking microwave ovens and TVs from Samsung, LG and others, and anyone at home or in an open-plan office could soon be within earshot of hundreds of microphones. Most of them will be listening for a wake word like "Alexa," "Hey Siri," or "OK Google," just as our phones and smart assistants do now. The roadmaps of tech giants and startups alike show how sound is poised to become the first ubiquitous connection between users and the artificial-intelligence hive mind the internet is becoming. Driving this change are massive volumes of components, originally designed for smartphones and other mobile devices, that have dropped in price and grown in functionality over the past decade. For a hundred years, microphones consisted of a relatively large membrane whose vibrations were converted to electrical impulses.

Having started my career in the pre-technology era, I am very accustomed to talking rather than texting. Plus, being from New York City, I frequently use my hands to communicate, gesturing to add emphasis or other emotions. All of this means that this new era of intelligent devices--objects you can speak to and wave at--is a very comfortable one for me. Voice-recognition technologies are among the top trends of 2018. Most of us are familiar with Siri, Google Home, and Alexa.

Simplehuman's a pretty household name in, uh, households across the country, what with its sensor mirrors, stainless steel dish racks and automatic soap dispensers. Now it's come up with yet another innovation; a trashcan you can activate with your voice. Known as the Sensor Can with Voice Control, you can open it just by saying "open can" and "open sesame." It sounds pretty silly at first, but it's actually potentially pretty useful if you have both hands full of food scraps. Of course, you could also just get a trash can with a foot pedal, but maybe you don't like those for aesthetic or design reasons.