If you have spent any time on “ice TikTok” over the past few years, you already know that nugget ice has gone from restaurant perk to full‑blown home obsession. Those soft, chewable pellets that used to be a treat at fast‑food soda fountains or hospital cafeterias are now a must‑have for iced coffee people, cocktail nerds, and anyone who thinks a drink should be as much about texture as temperature. What has not been as fun is living with most countertop nugget ice makers: they are loud, they are slow, they eat counter space, and a shocking number end up unplugged because owners get tired of babysitting cleaning cycles and listening to the compressor groan along all day.

GoveeLife, the appliance spin‑off of smart‑lighting brand Govee, is betting it can fix that with something a little more 2026: a connected, AI‑tuned, quietly efficient box called the Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro, which is making its debut at CES 2026 in Las Vegas. On paper, it reads less like a novelty gadget and more like a fully formed kitchen appliance that just happens to speak app and voice assistant.​

At the heart of the machine is a surprisingly muscular cooling system for something that sits on a countertop. GoveeLife is using a 96W high‑efficiency compressor paired with a DC motor and a beefed‑up condenser and fan assembly, which lets the unit start dropping nugget ice in as little as six minutes and ramp up to as much as 60 pounds of ice in a day. That is industrial‑style output in a machine aimed squarely at home users, and it speaks to how far this category has come as nugget ice has gone mainstream. The ice itself is formed on a stainless steel evaporator, which the company says helps produce denser, rounder pellets with a more consistent chew, rather than the airy, brittle nuggets that can melt into slush.​

Capacity is another pain point GoveeLife is trying to solve. Many compact nugget machines can churn quickly but force you to constantly empty or refill small tanks, which is not ideal if you are hosting or running a home bar. Here, GoveeLife has gone with a dual‑tank setup: a 2.2‑liter built‑in reservoir plus a 4.9‑liter detachable tank that together support continuous production of up to 15.6 pounds of ice in a single session. Translated into real life, the company pegs that at roughly 60 iced drinks before you have to think about water again, with a thickened ice bucket that can hold up to 3.5 pounds of ice and keep around 60% of it frozen for six hours. This is essentially “party mode” in a box: start it ahead of a game night or backyard hang and let it quietly stockpile.​

Noise, though, is where GoveeLife is trying to differentiate the most. Nugget machines are mechanically noisy by nature; they use an auger to scrape ice off an evaporator, which tends to freeze up, clunk, and groan in a way that makes you very aware there is a small factory living on your counter. GoveeLife’s answer is something it calls AI NoiseGuard, a patented system that uses an AI model trained to recognize freeze‑up events inside the machine with over 90% accuracy. When that model detects the early signs of trouble, the ice maker automatically kicks into a defrost routine to prevent the internal crunching and banging that usually follow, keeping production going while toning down the soundtrack. The company is pairing that with a DC motor and careful acoustic tuning to claim a 40‑decibel operating volume, roughly the level of a quiet library or soft conversation, which is a big deal if your kitchen is part of an open‑plan living space.​

This kind of “add AI to fix the annoying part” thinking is starting to show up across home appliances, but it is particularly on trend in ice makers and refrigeration, where brands are layering diagnostics and automation on top of fairly mature mechanical designs. Industry researchers expect nugget ice machines to grow steadily over the next decade, riding a broader wave of premium beverage culture, at‑home entertaining, and smart, self‑maintaining appliances. GoveeLife clearly wants to sit at the intersection of those trends: a lifestyle device as much as a tool, with enough tech sprinkled in to feel modern but not fussy.​

Day to day, the Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro leans on the kind of interface Govee fans will find familiar. There is a 4.45‑inch LCD touch display on the front and a “skyline” LED light bar that serves as a quick visual indicator of status, which helps the machine signal what it is doing without forcing you into the app. For maintenance, GoveeLife built in dual self‑cleaning modes so you can run a quick rinse or a deeper cleaning cycle, which matters because nugget machines—by design—circulate a lot of water around internal pathways that can get funky if neglected.​

Where the device really leans into the “smart” label is integration. Through the Govee Home app, you can remotely start or stop ice production, set schedules, and get nudges when water is low or when it is time to clean, which is exactly the kind of nagging that keeps a specialty appliance in actual rotation instead of gathering dust. The unit also works with Google Home and Amazon Alexa, meaning you can, in theory, yell across the room to have it start building a stash of nugget ice before movie night. For a brand that comes from the smart lighting world—where automations and scenes are everything—this sort of connected behavior feels like a natural extension into the kitchen.​

Visually, early photos of the Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro show a design that leans more toward “future‑forward appliance” than the utilitarian stainless‑box aesthetic of older ice machines. The enclosure has clean lines and a front window that lets you see the ice build up—an oddly satisfying element that taps right into the same dopamine that makes people film time‑lapses of their coffee brewing. That design push lines up with GoveeLife’s broader strategy: the brand has been racking up design awards for its appliances and positioning itself as the more lifestyle‑centric sibling to Govee’s smart lights.​

Of course, none of this comes cheap. When the Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro goes on sale January 15, 2026, it will land at $499.99 in the US, available through Amazon, Govee’s own site, Walmart, and Best Buy. That price plants it firmly in premium territory for a countertop ice maker, but GoveeLife is trying to sweeten the launch with a bundle: early buyers get a free GoveeLife air purifier worth $129.99 plus a 5 percent discount for the first week. For anyone already in the Govee ecosystem—or shopping for a smart‑kitchen centerpiece—the package is clearly designed to pull you deeper into the brand’s orbit.​

The timing and placement are very CES: the ice maker will show up first at CES Unveiled on January 4 at Mandalay Bay, then move to Govee’s booth at the Venetian Expo during the main show from January 6 to 9. Govee proper is using the same event window to talk up its next wave of smart lighting, including color‑accuracy pushes and expanded integrations, which makes the ice maker feel like part of a bigger narrative: Govee as a whole‑home experience rather than “just” strips behind your TV. GoveeLife, launched in 2023 as a separate brand, is meant to be the appliance arm of that story, with a lineup that now spans space heaters, dehumidifiers, air purifiers, and ice makers.​

More interesting, though, is GoveeLife’s stated roadmap. The company is treating the Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro as the opening shot in a broader push into kitchen gear: more ice makers tuned to different ice types, plus ice cream machines and other dessert‑adjacent devices to follow. It is a logical extension of where the market is heading; smart, compact ice makers and automatic ice systems are forecast to grow as connected kitchens become less of a novelty and more of a baseline expectation in new builds and higher‑end renovations. In that context, a quiet, app‑connected nugget ice machine is less of a weird flex and more of a signal that “smart home” is now very much a kitchen story, too.​

For now, the Smart Nugget Ice Maker Pro is aimed at a specific kind of household: the one where there is always a pitcher of cold brew brewing, where friends drift through on weekends, where someone has Opinions about the proper dilution of a whiskey highball. If that is your world, the idea of a machine that can quietly crank out 60 pounds of chewable ice a day, largely maintain itself, and slot into your existing smart‑home setup is going to be incredibly tempting. The real test will come after CES, when people start living with it through sticky summers and holiday crushes—but as a snapshot of where smart appliances are headed, GoveeLife’s icy little showpiece fits the moment almost perfectly.