A router that’s also a speaker. A mirror that’s also a lamp. A picture frame that charges your smartphone. Welcome to the hybrid gadget revolution! It’s a little bit Swiss Army knife, a little bit Island of Doctor Moreau.

Convergences have long been a staple of progress, from multitools to kitchen implements to every other As Seen on TV striver. Surely some medieval archer fashioned a backscratcher out of a bow. But over the past year or two, the combinations have come more quickly and grown both increasingly outlandish and outrageously useful. For that you can thank—or curse, depending on your tolerance for novelty—a confluence of factors.

Let’s start with the advance you’ve already guessed, or at least have already noticed in your own life: Alexa. Well, voice assistants generally. But it’s Amazon that has most aggressively courted hardware manufacturers, opening up a software development kit in August 2017 that made adding Alexa to anything a cinch. As of a year ago, about 50 third-party devices had Alexa baked in. By December 2018, that number had doubled. Add to those the 28,000 smart home devices that work with Amazon’s voice assistant—as in, they can’t talk themselves, but you can tell your Echo to turn them off and on—and you’ve got yourself quite a menagerie. One that includes both a microwave and a toilet.

Kohler's Numi 2.0 toilet brings Alexa—and mood lighting—into the bathroom. Amy Lombard

Yes, Kohler’s Numi 2.0 “intelligent” toilet will listen when you talk to it. It occupies space at the extreme end of the hybrid trend, introducing unlikely technological possibilities—like built-in surround speakers and LED mood lighting—to the bathroom. Do you need a toilet that listens? Do you want to pay $7,000 for the privilege? Numi 2.0 was understandably the butt (sorry) of more than a few jokes when it debuted at the CES tech trade show last week. And yet even at these heights of apparent absurdity, there’s a case to be made.

“We already know that 80 percent of consumers are bringing a phone or a tablet into the bathroom to do something,” Kohler project lead Jonathan Bradley says. “We know that 13 percent are already using voice in some regard. That’s what’s driving this push of voice into the bathroom. Consumers are already doing it. Kohler has an opportunity to do it in a more gracious experience.”

Gracious, indeed. Kohler has also put Alexa, as well as Google Assistant, in a line of bathroom mirrors and sells a voice-command faucet for kitchen sinks; it envisions a world in which you can chat with all of your fixtures. And while it feels like maximalist technology overload, Kohler contends that it actually has the opposite intent. “Think about the bathroom: It’s a spa-type environment. It’s a place for rest, relaxation, respite,” Bradley says. “It’s weird to try to have rest and relaxation and technology together. We’re trying to automate tasks so you don’t have to bring your phone in.”

A more streamlined manifestation of that same philosophy comes from Simplehuman, whose Sensor Mirror Hi-Fi combines a mirror, lamp, and speaker. You can upgrade to a Google Assistant–powered model, as well. It’s here that the contours of convergence start to make more intuitive sense. It’s nice to get the weather or listen to NPR as part of your morning routine; it’s helpful to have solid lighting when you apply foundation. And it’s genuinely convenient not to have to use your hands or clutter up your vanity to make any of those things work.

The Simplehuman Sensor Mirror Hi-Fi Assist stuffs a speaker, Google Assistant, and a lamp into a bathroom mirror. Amy Lombard

“We look at it as the entire experience the consumer has when they interact with the products. In this case it’s getting ready in the morning,” Simplehuman founder and CEO Frank Yang says. “We only add a feature if we think it adds to it in a meaningful way.”