LG unveiled its own competitor to Amazon Echo and Google Home on Wednesday – a home assistant that can play music and tell you the weather but also order your vacuum cleaner to start cleaning the house and turn on your oven.

The Hub Robot, which LG said will go on sale in 2017, was shown for the first time in Las Vegas ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show, which opens to the public on Thursday.

The device – a little white machine that has two glowing blue “eyes” on the front – appears to be a direct competitor to Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Introducing the Hub Robot, David VanderWaal, vice-president of marketing, home appliances & consumer at LG, described it as “your intelligent home assistant”.

It can also play music, tell you the about the weather and traffic – all things that Amazon Echo and Google Home can do.

The difference, the company argues, is the extra things Hub Robot will be able to do.

“It can pre-heat your oven,” VanderWaal said, and “initiate your robot vacuum cleaner when you leave the house”. It will also be able to turn on your washing machine and interact with your refrigerator.

One problem LG might have with the Hub Robot is that for it to do those things you would also need to own an oven, robot vacuum cleaner, washing machine and refrigerator that are all connected to Wi-Fi. LG sells all of these things, but it seems that to get the most out of the Hub Robot you will also need to spend thousands of dollars upgrading your home appliances.

If you are unable or unwilling to do that, it doesn’t seem the Hub Robot will do much more than its rivals – apart from have a little face.

LG just unveiled its "Hub Robot" home assistant which has a little face and will compete with Amazon Echo and Google Home #CES2017 pic.twitter.com/yZbGZ6HQPE — Adam Gabbatt (@adamgabbatt) January 4, 2017

Still, Taryn Brucia, LG’s director of public relations, told the Guardian that the Hub Robot “will compete” with Echo and Google Home.

“But we are working with our partners to see how we might synchronize to work with each other.”

Brucia would not give a release date but said the Hub Robot will be released in some countries this year.

“Fun. Life’s good,” she said, neatly referencing LG’s slogan. “We like to be playful.”

Artificial intelligence is one of the main themes of CES this year. On Tuesday Faraday Future, a fledgling electric car company, unveiled a car that will learn its driver’s preferences, while Honda will be presenting cars that can “artificially generate their own emotions”.

One thing that has not been discussed at the conference so far – at least not publicly – is the vulnerability of these artificially intelligent devices to hacking. At the Infosecurity Europe conference in May, industry experts and academics warned that the security of the internet of things – physical devices that connect to and operate through the internet – was being ignored because of the relative unimportance of those devices to date.

“We have a whole industry that is being ignored by the virtue of unimportance, but all of a sudden may find itself extremely [open] to attacks,” the Inquirer reported James Lyne, global head of security research at Sophos, as saying.

The message was that as the internet of things expands to include vehicles and important personal data – bank account details, or behavioural habits, for example– there is a need for these artificially intelligent devices to become more secure.

Another problem is the issue of privacy. In December, police in Arizona seized an Amazon Echo device, believing it may have recorded information that could help solve an murder.

Law enforcement also issued a warrant to Amazon to hand over data that may have been captured by the device. The Seattle-based tech company, however, is refusing to provide the police with the information they requested.