After a successful Kickstarter campaign, the Dabby TV AI box has turned up in the flesh at CES.
A TV-like box with a screen and dongle, Dabby lets you search for any kind of video or streaming content (providing it’s available and legal) by touch or voice, without opening apps or needing different streaming boxes and sticks.
Parent company Dabkick portrays its device as a sort of TV-specific Alexa:
Obviously, you do still have to be signed up to content providers – if you don’t have a Netflix subscription, it won’t be able to play Netflix content, for instance. But for those of us with multiple services, it sounds like a refreshing way to make using TV easy again.
If you want to use your Dabby box for multiple TVs, you’ll need more dongles, but the device detects where you are and automatically brings your content to the screen in whichever room you’ve just walked into, which is cool. It promises to always find the highest-quality video source it can, and reckons it can even isolate specific scenes in shows and films if you want them.
There are other features too, including being able to watch something in real-time with someone else (assuming they also have a Dabby), and the box can be used as a second screen for things like reading the Twitch comments while the stream plays on the TV.
Global availability is unknown at the moment, and the U.S. price of $399 (about $580) seems like a lot when you also need to pay for content subscriptions. We’ll be interested to see where this one goes. [Techradar]
This post originally appeared on Gizmodo UK, which is gobbling up the news in a different timezone.