Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Essential

Podcast: Robot, Meet Chatbot

In this episode, Mike looks at Andy Rubin’s new smart home platform, Essential Home. Rubin believes he can eliminate all the friction and fragmentation consumers face today with all the various platforms by focusing on integration. He’s created a smart home platform that plans to play nice with other platforms and hopefully get us out of a seemingly endless world of smart home apps and interfaces.

Our guest in this episode is Pawel Orzechowski, the Director of Systems Software at Neato Robotics. We talk about how Neato’s robots work with the smart home, how they are working towards new features and we look at why they decided to integrate their robots with a Facebook Messenger chatbot.

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out Smart Kitchen Summit, the first and only event about the future of food, cooking, and the kitchen. 

Rubin: Essential Home Will Be The “Bridge” Between Competing Smart Home Ecosystems

Last night Andy Rubin got on stage with Walt Mossberg at the Code Conference to discuss his new company.

The two spent a good chunk of the conversation talking about the Essential Phone, but when they finally got to the Essential Home, they didn’t disappoint.

I wrote yesterday about what we already knew about the Essential Home smart home product, but Andy’s discussion with Walt gave us a better understanding of the company’s strategy for the device.

Rubin and his team have (correctly) identified the main problem of the smart home as one of too many competing ecosystems. The main goal of the Essential Home is to solve for that.

Per Rubin: “One of the problems in the home is the UI problem. There are too many things you have to interact with in your home.”

While we often use that term UI to describe the various consumer interaction layers such as voice, touch or motion, Rubin is using the term more broadly here. He points to a fragmented smart home world with too many competing apps, smart home protocols, and technologies. And, as the guy behind Android, Rubin admitted that in many ways he helped create the problem.

“I feel somewhat responsible. One of things Android helped do make really easy to write a mobile app. the guy building your IoT doorbell, he’s going to write an app.”

According to Rubin, the problem with so many apps and technologies is each time a consumer walks through their smart home, they are walking through a series of competing apps and ecosystems.

“In certain ways,” said Rubin “the industry has recognized what the problem is, which is you don’t want to launch someone’s app when you walk up to your front door to unlock it, where they have their own UI, their own login credentials, and when you finally get through front door and its time to turn on your lights, do the same thing with the guy that built your light bulb.”

He’s right in saying the industry knows fragmentation is the main problem in consumer adoption. In our survey of over 100 smart home execs last December, the number one hurdle to adoption of smart home products identified by industry insiders is confusion over too many smart home platforms.

In other words, fragmentation. Or, as Rubin puts it, “a UI problem.”

Rubin said the solution to the problem of UI fragmentation is to bridge all of these competing ecosystems by working to integrate as many of them as possible together.

“You have to think of it as a UI problem,” said Rubin, “and you have to solve the UI for the home as an interoperability and integration issue. You can’t just support ten devices; you have to support one hundred thousand devices.”

That’s a lot of devices, but Rubin plans to get there by bridging the various ecosystems across the world of Apple, Amazon, Google and more. In other words, he doesn’t want to compete with the giants, but instead wants to connect them to one another.

“You can think of this as everyone is creating an island by creating their own ecosystem, so building bridges is the best way to describe what we’re doing. It has to talk to all these ecosystems, whether it’s Smart Things, HomeKit, or Google Home, or Thread or Weave.”

Rubin didn’t go into the specifics of how he plans to solve the fragmentation issue, other than to say they think they’ve found a way to do it. Whatever the approach is, it sounds like one built from the operating system on up with a focus on security.

“We had to build a new operating system so it can speak all those protocols and it can do it security and privately.”

That operating system is called Ambient OS. It will be part of the new Essential Home which is rumored to ship in late summer.

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out Smart Kitchen Summit, the first and only event on the future of the connected kitchen and the future of cooking. 

First Look At Essential Home, An AI-Powered Smart Home Platform From Andy Rubin

Anyone who’s followed tech over the past decade knows what a huge role Andy Rubin has played in mobile computing. As one of the principals behind the Sidekick mobile device, co-creator of the Android operating system and the architect of Google’s mobile strategy, it’s not an exaggeration to say Rubin is one of a handful of people who helped shape the face of the modern technology landscape.

So when Rubin left Google in 2013, many of us were curious if he had another big idea. With such a prolific track record, there was a good chance he wouldn’t be content just sitting around. The company he founded next, Playground Global, seemed innocuous enough at first – a venture fund for hardware – but was just shrouded enough in mystery to make one wonder if Rubin and his high-powered team had a surprise up their sleeves.

It turns out they did. That something is Essential, a new hardware company whose first two products are a new phone (called, naturally, the Essential Phone) and smart home platform called Essential Home.

Unlike the Essential Phone, the specifics of the Essential Home are somewhat vague. However, the clues we do have are tantalizing and show promise.

Here are the highlights:

Heavy on Scenes & Context

According to the company, the Essential Home isn’t just another control point for your devices, but instead one that is an “orchestra conductor for your digital instruments – something that can get them to start to work together in new, exciting ways.”

This means that it will likely work to create scenes across devices instead of straightforward device automation. That’s great but not all that different than other smart home platforms out there. However, there looks to be a heavy dose of AI-powered contextual understanding weaved into these scenes:

Essential Home “can take note of your routines and let you know when something feels off or if a light is left on. You can ask Essential Home to play your favorite music and when you start a conversation it will adjust the volume downward so you don’t have to talk over it. When you’re getting ready in the morning, Essential Home can show how long you have until you need to leave and even blink the lights when it is time… The best part? I can ask Essential Home to do all of this without having to fumble with an app.” 

This is not surprising. The era of simply being a smart connector box is so 2014, and today a smart home hub needs to be a virtual assistant that learns from past user activity, understands the physical living space in which it resides, and leverage data streams coming from other devices to proactively provide contextual recommendations.

Of course, anyone who uses anticipatory computing services like Google Assistant knows this all sounds great but can be annoying in practice if not executed well or if they take too heavy a hand in performing an unapproved action, so I am very intrigued to see well this performs in practice.

Light on Clouds

Cloud integration has become a fast and easy way for different smart devices to integrate. Product platforms such as Alexa, Samsung smart home, and others utilize the cloud to integrate with other devices, a much easier route to market than device to device direct integration.

However, relying on the cloud to power your smart home comes with disadvantages, something to which anyone who has had a broadband outage can attest. There are also greater privacy and security risks through relying on cloud services to power your smart home.

“We’ve designed Essential Home to run most things on the device itself, so most data stays in your home where it belongs. Essential Home will directly talk to your devices over your in-home network whenever possible to limit sending data to the cloud.”

By focusing on device-to-device interaction and keeping user data local as much as possible, the company seems to be making consumer privacy and data security a point of differentiation.

The Ambient OS

The introduction to Essential Home makes a bold statement: “The Home Now Has an OS.”

That would sound a lot like marketing fluff were it not coming from the guy who brought us Android. In a blog post by Essential’s head of software development, we get a few details about what this means:

“Ambient OS provides a set of services and abstractions that enable the development and execution of applications that run in the context of your home. With Ambient OS, your home is the computer. Ambient OS is aware of the physical layout of your home, the people that live in it, services relevant to both your home and the people within, and devices.

Ambient OS is the API to your home that enables the creation of applications that extend the reach of a single device. For example, you can setup a timer and have the lights in the livingroom flash when it goes off. With the Ambient OS API, developers have access to available devices, services, and home information and can use these resources as the building blocks of their applications.”

Of course, the devil is in the details, but I like the sound of where they are headed. The approach sounds less heavy than HomeKit, but more deeply integrated than services like IFTTT.

Ultimately, I think success will depend on how easy on-boarding of new third-party hardware will be. If the company takes low-friction approach that Alexa did initially with its Skill platform, they’re likely on the right track.  If they require a business relationship with third party devices to enable interoperability a la HomeKit, chances are it won’t fly. My guess would be it’s more prior than the latter.

Lastly, no one’s really captured the “magic” of the smart home in a way that is enough to propel the overall concept to go mass market. Amazon’s Alexa is the closest we’ve had to a an “iPhone moment” with the smart home. While it’s too soon to say if the Essential Home Ambient OS is another transformative product for the smart home, it sounds like that’s what Rubin’s team is aiming for.

Device Design

Based on the description of the device, obvious interaction methods include voice and touch control. The device description says a “glance” is enough to trigger an action, which could also mean motion sensing or even machine vision (though it doesn’t look like the Home has a camera on the initial product images I’ve seen).

The actual hardware looks pleasing enough, with a circular touch screen display and small, modern form factor. It doesn’t look like it has much in the way of a speaker – though I could be wrong or the device could change as it moves toward production – so I don’t know if it’s much of an Echo competitor.

Pricing is also a mystery. While the Essential Phone is premium priced at $749 (it’s made of titanium, after all), I’m sure the Home will be more affordable. Andy Rubin is speaking at the Code conference today, so we’ll update this post with any further details.

Related: Rubin: Essential Home Will Be The “Bridge” Between Competing Smart Home Ecosystems

Make sure to subscribe to the Spoon newsletter to get it in your inbox. And don’t forget to check out Smart Kitchen Summit, the first and only event on the future of the connected kitchen and the future of cooking.