Do they somehow detect moisture levels?
Are the two related at all or do they use different types of sensors?
Don’t know much about rice cookers, but clothes dryers sense either humidity or the rise in temperature caused by diminishing moisture.
Neither the rice cooker I used to own, or the tumble dryer I currently own, do anything automatically. They used timers.
From Consumer Reports
This is true for the dryers I use, but they’re in a pay laundromat. One quarter gets you five minutes of drying. (Used to be six when I first moved in, darn inflation. 
)
It’s actually pretty simple with rice cookers. With water present, the temperature is limited to the boiling point of water. Once the water is gone, the temperature can go higher. Put a RTD in there and have it click from cook to warm once it goes above T(boiling).
Washing machines (most of them) rely on a timer. Dyson marketed in the UK for a time a washing machine with a moisture sensor (IIRC).
That’s pretty much how my old el-cheapo rice cooker worked. Put rice+water in a pot, put water in the cooker under the pot. Water under the pot eventually evaporated, allowing the cooker’s temp to increase past the setpoint of a thermal switch, killing power; the rice then coasted to a finish.
Newer one just uses a timer.
You might be thinking about commercial units. All the home dryers I have had for 30 years in the USA had a moisture or temperature sensor as an “automatic” cycle option, along with timer options, too. Looking at random ads for new home units of several brands, all appear to have that feature (although some specs are a little ambiguous). Since I find that cycle to be the most useful, I can’t imagine having to guess at the time and checking at intervals. Mine just beeps when it thinks the clothes are dry, then continues in a cool-down cycle for a while longer before shutting off.
Yeah, you lost me there as well. Every modern dryer that I have seen in a house has had both timed and dryness-sensing settings.
My rice cooker and clothes dryer either tastes the rice or feels the clothes. She’s the best.
As long as she doesn’t get them mixed up – feels the rice and tastes the clothes.
Sorry – I cook rice (cheap rice maker, again sorry), but I have the same dryer as Philster.
Fuzzy logic and rice cookers.