CES Hands On: The best smart home gear coming in 2023

At the 2023 CES, we went hands on with some of the best smart home products to launch outside of Apple's HomeKit ecosystem.

The smart home is continuing to evolve so while there are a lot of HomeKit-enabled accessories -- of which we already covered -- there is plenty more smart home tech that Apple users will love.

Here, we're covering all the other ancillary smart home gear, from bar machines to camera-equipped bird feeders.

If you haven't checked it out, we also rounded up all the Find My devices and Apple accessories that made their debut at CES 2023.

BirdBuddy

Whether you're an avid ornithologist or just like watching your backyard avians, the BirdBuddy bird feeder is very cool. It's a modular feeder with an integrated camera to see all the feathered friends that frequent your yard.

The standard version of the bird feeder connects the camera to a battery pack and solar panel, making it self-contained. At CES, they also showed us a new version that's a hummingbird feeder.

With the hummingbird feeder, there are three spouts at the bottom where the birds can drink the sweet food you put in. The camera is the same as the regular bird feeder in this new housing.

Rachio hose timer

Rachio has been well-known for its whole-yard irrigation systems and now the company is moving to the above-ground game. Its new hose controller can connect directly to your home's water faucet where you can then attach a hose, sprinkler, and more.

With the app, you can set your preferred schedule for watering and there is a user-determined auto shutoff for when you manually water.

The device connects to a Wi-Fi adapter that goes inside your house so you can control it remotely too. While HomeKit isn't supported, the company showed interest in adding Siri Shortcuts so the device could maintain voice control for Apple users.

One of our favorite features is it has an integrated rate gauge to determine precisely how much water you're using which is useful in parts of the country where you have to track your water usage closely.

Rise Garden

The Rise Garden is the most impressive indoor grow setup we've tried yet. It's modular and can be a single shelf or stretch roughly five feet tall with three shelves full of produce.

It's all monitored and tracked using the Rise Garden app that allows you to enter what you planted and where. The app will tell you when to trim your plants, let you know when to add nutrients, and otherwise provide tips to increase your yield.

Small shelves optionally attach to the sides and you can also outfit it with trellises and other parts depending on what you're growing.

The garden works so well that we saw tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapeos, mini sunflowers, cauliflower, marigolds, Swiss chard, and more all being grown. Much of that is very hard to raise in an indoor garden.

The garden can integrate with Amazon Alexa at this point so you can manually shut the lights off the predetermined schedule if in an area like a living room or dining room.

Trova Home

The Trova Home debuted at CES a few years back and is finally available to order. It's perfect for storing personal items, medications, and more.

It has biometric authentication, app control, and charging ports inside the safe. Sensors baked in will send you tamper alerts if someone tries to move the safe.

Noesis smart robot vacuum

Several robot vacuum cleaners will mop your floor before returning to the dock that cleans the mop and refills it with fresh water. The problem is they can start to smell with use from the moisture and dirty water.

Noesis Florio looks to fix this by instead using replaceable mopping pads. Each pad is biodegradable and the dock can hold 15 soiled pads before it needs emptied. When the robot returns after mopping, the dock removes the old pad and installs a new one.

You can even program the Noesis vacuum to change the pad between rooms to prevent cross-contamination. For example, put on a new mopping pad after cleaning the bathroom.

Moen irrigation system

Moen introduced its first irrigation system this year. This can create a whole-home experience for users who use Moen smart faucets and Moen shower systems inside their homes.

You can create a schedule based on local weather, broken into zones, and all of the other features you'd expect from a Moen-designed watering controller.

GE Profile stand mixer

GE grew its Profile lineup in December with the announcement and preorder phase of its Profile stand mixer. Now the device is available for everyone to order.

The company tried to reimagine what a stand mixer is -- from how the attachments are attached to where the lift arm is. The whole mixer can be a scale to weigh your ingredients and you can twist the top to use the built-in timer.

The mixer has pressure sensors in the paddle and they're combining this with the app to help you mix various recipes. With updates, it can tell when you've kneaded your pizza dough sufficiently or when your meringue has stiff enough peaks. You can just turn the mixer on and let it run.

Brava smart oven

The Brava smart oven has a ton of tech built in. There's a heat-resistant camera to monitor what's cooking and you just need to place your food inside where the oven's AI identifies what you put in and takes care of the rest.

It has more than 7,000 hands-free recipes supported on the Brava oven that just need you to place the food inside.

For CES 2023, Brava has an updated version of its oven that swaps the all-metal door for a new door with glass. The glass door model still has a dark opacity and a metallic tint for a unique look but you can see inside the oven while it's cooking.

Bartesian

Bartesian has been our go-to cocktail maker at home for a while and its new version is a very tempting upgrade. This smart machine identifies the pod of mixers you add in and then can quickly mix a cocktail with no alcohol, light, regular, or strong.

This new version only supports two liquor bottles at a time, meaning it takes up far less space than the preexisting model that held four bottles of liquor. This means you're limited in what you can make without swapping bottles but if you like margaritas or Caribbean drinks, you may only need tequila and rum on hand.

Synology DS723+

Synology released its DS723+ at CES 2023, one of its more compact NAS models. This model can hold two 3.5-inch or 2.5-inch drives in a variety of RAID formations.

What's new is that the bottom has slots for two extra M.2 SSD models and a 2.5Gb Ethernet jack can be outfitted for high-speed home networks.

Typhur sous vide

Finally, the Typhur sous vide machine is here to help you learn how to use sous vide, and for much more than just protein. It has an integrated water tank that is quite large, a vacuum sealer and bags, weights to keep the food submerged, and a large touchscreen interface.

Search through all of the recipes to find something you'd like to make. When you do stumble upon something, there's a video demo of the recipe, the ingredients that will sync to your phone, and a step-by-step guide to making it.

Typhur seems to have thought through so many of the pain points for sous vide by integrating so many features into a single unit. The downside is it is quite large to leave on your counter every day, but Typhur told us they hope you'll get more use out of it that way with the wide range of recipes they are providing.