TP-Link had something I wasn’t expecting at CES this year, Aireal, an AI assistant designed to sit across both networking and smart home, so you can manage the stuff that normally takes five apps and a troubleshooting session with a simple conversation.
What stood out in the CES demos is that Aireal is not positioned as a gimmick. It’s built in collaboration with Microsoft and launches inside TP-Link’s Deco and Tapo ecosystems, using Microsoft Foundry to power more natural voice interactions and real-time responses. The pitch is simple: explain what you want in plain language, and Aireal figures out the right settings or actions across routers, cameras, lights, and everything in between, including walking you through problems in human terms instead of throwing error codes at you.
The most interesting feature is the way it treats cameras and recordings. Aireal is meant to go beyond basic motion alerts by letting you search video conversationally, like asking when a package arrived, when someone showed up at the door, or when the kids got home, and it pulls the relevant clips without endless scrolling. It also aims to cut down notification fatigue by summarizing what matters and merging repeat alerts, while quietly improving the network in the background with proactive optimization features like AI QoS, anti-interference, and self-healing.
Aireal is available starting now with Tapo devices, and TP-Link was showcasing it alongside new cameras at CES, including the Tapo C645D Kit, Tapo C465 (a 4K solar camera), and the Tapo C710 floodlight camera. If TP-Link can deliver this with the speed and reliability they’re promising, Aireal could be the kind of AI that actually earns its place at home, not another assistant you forget about after the first week.
