CES 2026 is going on right now. For those unaware, that’s the Consumer Electronics Showcase, where massive tech companies and small plucky entrepreneurs come together to show off their wares.
Some of it will end up in your home or office, while many are too absurd to be seen anywhere other than the show floor. Other products delicately toe the line between practical and ludicrous.
For instance, if you thought toothbrush innovation reached its zenith with the electric toothbrush, you are sorely mistaken, as CES 2026 is where you can behold the majesty of the Y-Brush.
It’s an electric toothbrush that doesn’t end with a single rectangular head of bristles but is capped off with what looks like a sports mouthguard filled with bristles, allowing you to brush all your teeth at once for maximum efficiency and fully optimized stupidity.
Yep. AI Bartenders Are Here.
In the same vein, a company called Breakreal unveiled the R1, an AI-powered cocktail-making machine for the home. What AI has anything to do with making a martini is beyond my comprehension, and from the sound of it, likely also Breakreal’s comprehension.
This isn’t the first time someone has tried to make a cocktail-making machine for home use. If you’ve got $400 to spare, right now you can buy yourself a Bartesian: a machine that lets you make a variety of cocktails with the push of a button.
The R1 is being billed as an “AI bartender,” which basically just means that it’s a smart cocktail machine that adds algorithmic personalization to what the Bartesian can already do. It comes with a companion app, as everything must nowadays.
The app will dig into your taste preferences, spirits of choice, and even your specific mood at the time to generate a drink recipe that’s tailored specifically to you. Yep, the algorithms that destroyed the internet are now coming for your drinks. Thankfully, you can bypass all that AI nonsense and just have the R1 make you a classic cocktail, which, I wager, is how most people who buy it are going to use it.
The catalog of drinks it can mix is not infinite. This thing isn’t a Star Trek-style food replicator that can assemble any cocktail in existence. It can hold up to eight ingredients at once, including alcohols, mixers, syrups, and juices. You can only make drinks that contain some combination of those eight. If you put in the ingredients for a Manhattan, you had better be committed to drinking Manhattans for the foreseeable future.
During a CES demo attended by Gizmodo’s James Pero, a Breakreal rep entered a prompt about being happy to be at CES 2026 and sent it off to the R1. The R1 then mixed a drink based on that idea alone within about a minute. Pero says that he has no idea what drink the R1 made from that prompt, but, as he put it, “it did make… something.”
Early pricing starts at $1,099, with a full MSRP of $1,299. At that rate, if you really need someone to make a cocktail for you, you could just drive your behind to the bar. If you’re concerned about drinking and driving, it would still probably cost you less to hire a bartender to come to your house for an hour.
Ultimately, convenience tends to be a major factor in deciding if a piece of tech sticks around for the long run. People are drinking so much nowadays. Maybe if they didn’t have to put in any effort, they might drink a little more.
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