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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

HomeKit

The Smart Home Weekly: HomeKit’s Big Week & The Debut of HomePod

Each week I look at the biggest story in smart home and give context to what’s happening in the connected home around the web.

This was the most important week for HomeKit since Apple announced it in June 2014.

That’s because, on Monday the company announced a host of critical updates to their smart home protocol and, just as importantly, launched their new wireless smart speaker/HomeKit hub, the HomePod.

Long rumored, the HomePod is what most of us thought it would be: a wireless speaker with built-in Siri. But with this announcement, Apple filled in many of the holes and showed us exactly how they plan to fight back against Amazon and Google in the digital home.

One thing is clear: Apple is leading with music, telling us that the HomePod will revolutionize home music. With HomePod and the launch of AirPlay 2 with multiroom audio, Apple is going directly after the Sonos consumer.  The device, which costs $349, is an impressive piece of hardware, with seven tweeters, six microphones for far-field listening and its own A8 processor.

It was also a big week for HomeKit. Apple’s long-gestating smart home protocol had its biggest week since it debuted at WWDC in 2014. And while the HomePod – a dedicated HomeKit hub – was the main attraction of the day, Apple made some important announcements about HomeKit itself:

Software authentication – At WWDC this week, Apple indicated they will now allow HomeKit hardware makers to create products without the dedicated chip. This is important because one of the reasons the slow rollout of HomeKit was the requirement of an MFI security chip in each HomeKit device. All that said, given Apple’s strong focus on security, there’s no doubt that the new software authentication will be very robust and HomeKit partners will have to work hard to get software-based authentication through the HomeKit certification process.

NFC and QR code pairing: Apple wants to make HomeKit set up experience easier. NFC and QR code pairing will go a long way towards doing just that.

HomeKit is opening up to anyone with developers license: Before this move, a company had to be a member of Apple’s MFI third party hardware program. Now, Apple is opening the doors to HomeKit to anyone who is an Apple developer. This will greatly increase the number of smart people innovating around the framework.

The Smart Home Show

This week’s episode of the Smart Home Show is all about Apple’s HomePod and HomeKit. Have a listen below:

New From Around The (Smart Home) Web:

Samsung Combo Wireless Mesh Router/SmartThings Hub Available for Pre-Order: Samsung put its mesh router/Smart Things hub up for preorder. The new Connect Home comes with a built in SmartThings hub with Z-Wave and Zigbee radios and built-in mesh Wi-Fi. At this point, the mesh Wi-Fi market is becoming crowded, but the combo of smart home hub and mesh is a nice differentiator for Samsung and makes them comparable in feature set to to the Almond 3 mesh router/smart home hub.

Unikey Gets More $: One of the original Bluetooth smart lock technology providers, Unikey, has received another round of funding, bringing in $5 million from two private equity firms, adding to other strategic investors such as Samsung Ventures. What’s interesting here is the company looks like they’re going to use the capital to expand further into the pro/commercial lock space and new markets like automotive. When I talked to Unikey CEO Phil Dumas on the very first Smart Home Show, he talked back then about possibly expansion into automotive.

Samsung Rumored To Be Working on Smart Speaker: Of course they are. In a way, the key battle in the digital home is not for the home router or set-top box, but now its for the interface, and it seems the smart speaker is becoming the default form factor and device to act as that key interface. Samsung’s version of a smart speaker will be powered by Bixby, the company’s voice assistant technology. Is this a good idea? In theory. I mean, it makes sense for a company like Samsung to create their own, but as always with Samsung and the connected home its about execution.

Make sure to check out the Smart Kitchen Summit, the only event about the future of food, cooking and the kitchen. Also, make sure to subscribe to get The Spoon in your inbox. 

Analysis: With HomePod, Apple May Finally Deliver On The Promise Of HomeKit

After months of rumors, Apple finally introduced a wireless streaming speaker called HomePod this week, their first new hardware product since the Apple Watch debuted in 2015.  The Siri-enabled wireless speaker also doubles as a HomeKit powered smart home hub, giving Apple a new fixed HomeKit control point beyond Apple TV. The HomePod will ship in December and is priced at $349.

There is a bunch to break down here, including the HomePod compares to Amazon’s Echo, but let’s first look at what exactly Apple introduced.

The Hardware

The new HomePod is an impressive piece of hardware. The HomePod includes Apple’s A8 chip, a system-on-chip CPU/GPU that debuted in 2014 with the iPhone 6. It has a six-microphone array with advanced echo cancellation, which Apple says will enable “Siri to understand people whether they are near the device or standing across the room, even while loud music is playing.”  The Siri-powered speaker also features seven beam-forming tweeters, each with an amplifier, and it also includes what Apple calls room-sensing technology that allows the device to optimize its sound based on the specific spatial characteristics of where music is being played.

During the event, Apple made a string of other important announcements that led up to the climactic debut of the HomePod:

AirPlay2

One of the most important foundational technology upgrades announced Monday was AirPlay 2, a much-needed update to Apple’s wireless streaming protocol. With Airplay 2 we finally get multiroom audio support, a huge upgrade that will allow homes with Apple’s HomePod – as well as products from partners like Bose, Bang & Olufsen, Marantz and others – to stream audio wirelessly to different rooms and to multiple speakers. The upgrade puts Apple’s streaming music framework on par with Google’s Chromecast for audio, which already supports multiroom audio.

Apple’s AirPlay 2 Early Partners. Image credit: The Verge

A notable absence from the list of initial partners was Sonos, a company that almost single-handedly created the wireless multiroom audio category.

HomeKit

The release of AirPlay 2 will not only bring multiroom audio support, but it also adds speakers to the list of devices controllable with Apple’s smart home protocol, HomeKit. By adding the speaker category to HomeKit, consumers will be able to control their wireless speakers through the iOS Home app.

The arrival of the HomePod also brings a second fixed smart home hub device into the lineup. Like Apple TV, the HomePod allows for remote access to any HomeKit compatible device through the Home app. However, with far-field listening capabilities and integrated Siri, the HomePod instantly surpasses Apple TV to become Apple’s most capable smart home hub.

What Does All This Mean?

The pricing, capabilities, industrial design and messaging gave us all we need to know to break down Apple’s strategy:

The HomePod Is, Above All, A Music Product: The HomePod is built to be a great wireless streaming speaker. With seven beam-forming tweeters – that’s one more sound driver than the Sonos Play 5 – it’s built to sound great. Sure, the HomePod has built-in Siri, but Apple messaged this as a revolutionary multi-room speaker first and a virtual assistant second.

This Is a Premium Product : The price of the HomePod, $349, may seem fairly affordable when compared to other Apple products, but at roughly double the price of the Amazon Echo and nearly triple that of Google Home, this is a much higher priced than other smart speakers.  It’s clear Apple has Sonos, probably moreso than Amazon or Google, in its crosshairs.

Apple Is Finally Bringing An Upgraded Siri Home: One of the messages from Apple this week is Siri has finally grown up. By adding anticipatory computer features, opening it up further to developers with a year two SiriKit and creating a Siri face for Apple Watch, the company finally feels they have a virtual assistant on par with Google Assistant. And now with HomePod, Apple has a true voice assistant to bring into the home.

Apple Vs. Amazon

Where does this position Apple relative to Amazon and the Echo?

I think given the premium pricing strategy, Apple appears to be ceding the fixed smart speaker mass market to Amazon. By choosing a music-first, premium approach, Apple appears content to let Amazon win the numbers battle with its lower-cost smart speaker.

However, letting Amazon blanket the mass market with $49 Echo Dots does not mean Apple is ceding the virtual assistant market to Amazon. In fact, if we learned anything this week it’s that Apple plans to leverage the hundreds of millions of Siri-powered iPhones, iPads and Apple Watchs in the market as it does battle with Alexa. .

And not only is Apple leading with iOS, but they plan to make it a much more rich and robust platform with new efforts like ARkit, their new augmented reality developer platform. Imagine pairing a well-done augmented reality app with a voice assistant capability in the home, and you might have something pretty cool.

Ok, so while it’s a bit of a risky strategy, it’s probably the right one for Apple. By ‘dancing with one who brought them’ in iOS and augmenting their home strategy with a premium-priced smart speaker/virtual assistant for the home with HomePod, Apple now at least has a strategy to do battle with Echo, even if their new smart speaker is priced out of reach for some consumers.

Lastly, let’s not forget that the HomePod with HomeKit is a true smart home hub, with all the built-in intelligence to make a powerful Apple-powered smart home come to life. While the Amazon Echo has done an good job integrating with hundreds of various smart home devices through its skill platform, it’s limited in its ability to execute on things such as scenes. With HomeKit and a new rev of the Home app for iOS, I think Apple may finally have what it needs with the HomeKit-HomePod combo to deliver on the early promise that had so many excited about HomeKit.

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 only event on the future of the food, cooking, and the kitchen. 

The WWDC 2017 Prediction Show (Smart Home Edition)

Are you ready for WWDC?

Apple’s big developer conference is just three days away, and so it’s time to make some predictions. I get together with my old friend Adam Justice from Connectsense to discuss what we can expect this coming Monday from Apple on the smart home front.

Topics discussed include:

  • We speculate whether Apple will release a Siri speaker
  • Possible features of a Siri speaker, such as camera, touchscreen, HomeKit capabilities and more
  • What’s in store for HomeKit
  • Ways in which Apple could improve the Home app
  • What to expect for Siri at WWDC

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. 

Can Smart Kitchen Avoid The Missteps Of The Smart Home?

A few years ago, signs of the coming smart home era were everywhere: Retailers like Staples launched their smart home lines, old-line manufacturers like GE partnered up with fast-moving startups like Quirky, and even Apple launched its own smart home framework called HomeKit.

And of course, any ‘next-big-thing’ would not be complete without a high-profile acquisition. That came in January 2014, when Google announced they would buy Nest for over $3 billion. If the smart home was hot before Google gobbled up Nest, it got white hot after. More money poured into startups, new standards emerged, and Google, not surprisingly, acquired more companies.

But by mid-2015, the bloom had come off the smart home rose. Quirky booted its CEO and looked to sell off assets, Staples scaled back its smart home ambitions and shuttered the project altogether this year, and Apple’s HomeKit stuttered and stopped right out of the gate.

And what about Nest, Google’s $3 billion smart home unicorn? After some high-profile struggles over the past few years, founder Tony Fadell left in June 2016, while the group he left behind is forced to watch as Google hands newer smart home efforts like Google Home to other groups.

Can smart kitchen, which relies on many of the same technologies, avoid the same fate? Below are some ways in which the smart kitchen may differ from the broader smart home.

Focused Benefits

One of the greatest ironies of the smart home – where the promise of your things working together is the raison d’être – is that some of its biggest hits are those products that work well largely on their own. Smart doorbells, video cams, and connected lightbulbs all work as part of a larger fabric of devices but often fly solo as consumers embrace them for the product-specific benefits they offer.

As it turns out, many consumers buy new kitchen tech with a singular focus in mind.  Whether it’s a Bluetooth meat thermometer to monitor your steak while you’re watching football or the sous vide circulator you use to cook seafood, those smart kitchen products that have been successful have been focused tools that do one or two things well.

Just Stash It

One of the reasons retailers have been disappointed with smart home products is the category suffers from high return rates. With complaints ranging from installation problems or interoperability issues, there’s a good chance that a consumer will return a smart home product once the shine wears off.

With smart kitchen, things are a little different. Some products like sous vide circulators often get put into regular usage as consumers embrace a new way to cook, while others, like Bluetooth thermometers, may get stuck in the drawer for long periods of time, only to get called upon when needed.

Either way, according to retailers like b8ta, consumers appear less likely to return them.

Smart kitchen products have “extremely low return rates” relative to other connected home products according to Vibhu Norby, CEO of IoT product retailer b8ta.

“I think people are more likely to stash connected kitchen products they don’t use vs. return, which is quite different from the rest of connected home.”

Riches in Niches

While some early adopters may have a deep passion for tech, no one but the most ardent geeks would say they’re passionate about connected lighting or a learning thermostat.

With food, there are deep veins of passion to mine nearly everywhere you look. If juicing is your life, $700 for a Keurig for juice might seem like a good deal. Want to explore precision cooking to try and cook like a James Beard award winning chef? Drop $1800 on the Control Freak. Love entertaining at home but can’t afford a bartender? Perfect Drink might be your answer.

One Big Similarity: It’s All New To Consumers

However, despite these differences, there is one thing that the smart kitchen and smart home have in common: both are mostly new to consumers.

While most consumers would instantly understand something like a robotic bartender, the reality is it – and many other smart kitchen products – represent a much different way of doing things than the status quo. And even more staid products like Samsung’s Family Hub fridge are going to take some time to catch on, as most consumers will find features like image-based inventory recognition – and $5 thousand plus price tags – somewhat exotic.

Bottom line: The smart kitchen has unique dynamics and taps into deep areas of interest for consumers that may enable it to avoid some of the broader smart home’s problems but, just as with the smart home, the need for market education remains.