Skip to main content

Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards

tech for change ces 2023 awards digital trends award winners banner
Image used with permission by copyright holder
The CES 2025 logo.
Read and watch our complete CES coverage here

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Samsung’s Relumino Mode

Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.

[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung

Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to “normal” than it otherwise would.

Recommended Videos

Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs — not just new and recently purchased ones.

Acapela Group's My Own Voice
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Acapela Group’s My Own Voice

My Own Voice is basically audio deepfake technology that’s been streamlined, simplified, and reimagined as a tool to help people — specifically, people who might eventually lose the ability to speak due to illness or injury. Functionally speaking, the platform allows users to synthetically clone their voice and preserve the unique tone, timbre, and personality that makes it theirs — something that’s typically lost with most text-to-speech software (think Stephen Hawking, or the text-to-speech function on your MacBook).

Super Fast AI Voice Cloning at CES #shorts

The software can create an impressively realistic voice clone after hearing just 50 sentences of reference audio, which is a drop in the bucket compared to the massive data sets that are typically required to create a convincing voice clone. To be fair, this isn’t necessarily new technology, but it’s really exciting to see it applied to helping people — and not just to making novelty smartphone apps and silly YouTube overdub videos.

Samsung's ‘Less Microfiber’ Technology
Image used with permission by copyright holder

Samsung’s ‘Less Microfiber’ Technology

Microplastics are everywhere. They’re in our oceans, they’re in our food, and they’re even in our bodies. By some estimates, we consume about a credit card’s worth of plastic every few weeks — and a wide variety of studies have shown that all that plastic is screwing with both our bodies and the ecosystem at large. Samsung’s new Less Microfiber tech aims to help with that.

samsung washing machine on less microfiber cycle
Image used with permission by copyright holder

How? Well, One of the biggest sources of microplastics is our laundry. As we wash our clothing, tiny little pieces break away from synthetic fibers like polyester and nylon, then eventually make it down the drain and into our waterways. So in an effort to stop that process, Samsung has developed two technologies: a special wash cycle that requires less agitation and therefore creates less microfiber while you wash, as well as an inline filter that catches any fibers that make it through and pass into the drain hose. The coolest part, though, is that Samsung designed the filter to be compatible with any washer — not just the ones that it manufactures and sells.

Drew Prindle
Former Senior Editor, Features
Drew Prindle is an award-winning writer, editor, and storyteller who currently serves as Senior Features Editor for Digital…
Google just gave vision to AI, but it’s still not available for everyone
Gemini Live App on the Galaxy S25 Ultra broadcast to a TV showing the Gemini app with the camera feature open

Google has just officially announced the roll out of a powerful Gemini AI feature that means the intelligence can now see.

This started in March as Google began to show off Gemini Live, but it's now become more widely available.

Read more
This modular Pebble and Apple Watch underdog just smashed funding goals
UNA Watch

Both the Pebble Watch and Apple Watch are due some fierce competition as a new modular brand, UNA, is gaining some serous backing and excitement.

The UNA Watch is the creation of a Scottish company that wants to give everyone modular control of smartwatch upgrades and repairs.

Read more
Tesla, Warner Bros. dodge some claims in ‘Blade Runner 2049’ lawsuit, copyright battle continues
Tesla Cybercab at night

Tesla and Warner Bros. scored a partial legal victory as a federal judge dismissed several claims in a lawsuit filed by Alcon Entertainment, a production company behind the 2017 sci-fi movie Blade Runner 2049, Reuters reports.
The lawsuit accused the two companies of using imagery from the film to promote Tesla’s autonomous Cybercab vehicle at an event hosted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) Studios in Hollywood in October of last year.
U.S. District Judge George Wu indicated he was inclined to dismiss Alcon’s allegations that Tesla and Warner Bros. violated trademark law, according to Reuters. Specifically, the judge said Musk only referenced the original Blade Runner movie at the event, and noted that Tesla and Alcon are not competitors.
"Tesla and Musk are looking to sell cars," Reuters quoted Wu as saying. "Plaintiff is plainly not in that line of business."
Wu also dismissed most of Alcon's claims against Warner Bros., the distributor of the Blade Runner franchise.
However, the judge allowed Alcon to continue its copyright infringement claims against Tesla for its alleged use of AI-generated images mimicking scenes from Blade Runner 2049 without permission.
Alcan says that just hours before the Cybercab event, it had turned down a request from Tesla and WBD to use “an icononic still image” from the movie.
In the lawsuit, Alcon explained its decision by saying that “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
Alcon further said it did not want Blade Runner 2049 “to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company, for all of these reasons.”
But according to Alcon, Tesla went ahead with feeding images from Blade Runner 2049 into an AI image generator to yield a still image that appeared on screen for 10 seconds during the Cybercab event. With the image featured in the background, Musk directly referenced Blade Runner.
Alcon also said that Musk’s reference to Blade Runner 2049 was not a coincidence as the movie features a “strikingly designed, artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.”

Read more