Nest

November 8, 2017

Exclusive: Nest Working On “Smart Chime System” With Unique Sounds For Events, People, Zones

While it took a while for Nest to jump into the home security game, it looks like they may just be getting started.

What’s one potential trick up their sleeves?

Smart chimes.

That’s right, the folks within the Nest security team have filed for a patent that was published on November 2nd of this year that would transform a home security’s chime system into one that assigns unique chimes to specific people, locations, and events.

According to the patent filing, Google/Nest is working on a smart chime system that would play unique sounds depending on the location, type of event, whether a person is unidentified or identified, etc.

The description excerpted below describes the shortcomings of a conventional home chime system and how the one envisioned by Google/Nest would be different (bold emphasis added by me):

At least one problem common to conventional door chime systems is that door chimes offer only one type of sound effect for all doors and windows. As a result, the chime does not provide any information as to exactly which door or window was opened. Furthermore, the homeowner does not know if the chime sound indicates a person leaving the house, coming inside the house, just a window opening, or exactly who opened the door or window.

Another problematic feature common to many conventional door chime systems is disabling a chime from being sounded if one door or window is already open. In the scenario in which the front door is open and then a second door is opened, the opening of the second door does not cause the chime effect to be sounded, thus the residents are not informed.

The disclosed smart door chime system remedies these problems and provides many other improvements. The disclosed system can provide a customized chime or other sound based on current data obtained by sensors, historical data obtained by sensors, user input data, and additional factors as will be described below. The disclosed smart door chime system can process and store data that has been captured by sensors and analyze the data to extract information about the environment, such as activity of a person, identify of a person, activity of a pet, motion, etc. Based on the data, the disclosed smart door chime system selects an output profile that determines a specific sound to be played on a specific set of speakers. Accordingly, many different scenarios may be addressed and customized chimes or sounds can inconspicuously convey to users a wide variety of information about occurrences at a premises.

In short, Nest wants to be able to utilize motions sensors, cameras, facial recognition and other technologies to create a highly specific chime system to let the user create highly tailored audio signals to understand better what is going on around the home. Does Fido keep sneaking into the bedroom and eating your slippers? There’s a chime for that. Want to know when your youngest kid has walked out the backdoor? There’s a chime. A stranger’s entered your home. Chime.

Not only that, it looks like the system could allow for some fun. For example, the patent application describes how you could tee up specific songs or audio files to play. Spouse home from a long business trip and you want drop some clues for a romantic night at home? Just tee up a little Business Time from Flight of the Conchords when they walk through the front door.

You can see from the image below how the system would allow for tailored “zones” throughout the house:

Zones within the Google/Nest smart chime system

The image below shows how you can create specific rules and zones depending on the event. As you can see, you can play a chosen chimes/audio files in specific locations based on predetermined rules around events:

Rules for Google/Nest smart chime system allows user to tailor rules by event/zone/speaker

I’m not sure about you, but this sounds like a pretty useful feature. I can see how folks with young kids, pets or special needs family members could use a smart chime system to help them monitor the goings on in the home.

One such example would be to use a smart chime system to monitor autistic children. Parents with autistic kids often struggle with their children’s tendency to wander, and one could imagine using special chimes to alert when an autistic child gets near a door.

While this is only a patent application, let’s hope the team at Nest plan to turn the smart chime system into an actual product.

August 23, 2017

Tim Enwall Thinks A Robot Should Be Our Friend, Not A “Mechanized Piece of Metal”

If you have a robot in your home today, chances are it vacuums your floor or mows your lawn. And while you may be thankful for the back pain the little guy spares you, I’m willing to bet you don’t consider this industrious single-tasker your friend.

Tim Enwall, the CEO of Misty Robotics, thinks that needs to change.

A robot “can’t be this mechanized piece of metal that runs around the house or office,” said Enwall. “It has to be able to develop a relationship with us.”

I recently had a conversation with Enwall about the future of personal robotics for the Smart Home Show. How we relate to robots is something Enwall thinks a lot about since his company has made it their mission to be the first to create a real world version of Rosie, the famed cartoon robot from the Jetsons.

Enwall outlined four features that Misty CTO and founder Ian Bernstein sees as crucial for a personal robot:

It’s got to be familiar. “It can’t be freaky, it can’t put us off,” said Enwall. He admitted that many of today’s robots have too much uncanny vally-esque creepiness. “We will get there, but today they’re too off putting.”

It has to develop a relationship with us. This is where Enwall points out robots can’t just be metal cans running around our homes. “That’s not going to be valuable or interesting to us,” said Enwall.

It’s got to be multifunction. “We can’t go buy 20 single purpose robots for our house or office,” said Enwall. Here Enwall essentially points out today’s world of primarily single purpose robots is not sustainable. In other words, unless we want to add a room to our home for a robot garage, we’re going to need robots that can perform multiple tasks.

It has to be useful. While this one seems related to the last one, it makes sense to break it out. A multifunction robots that can do many chores is something I would put hard-earned money down for.

Lastly, Enwall added a fifth characteristic he believes important for personal robots, one which essentially makes them human-like:

It has to be able to manipulate things. Here Enwall is basically points out what makes man different from other animals, and that robots need to do the same. I’m assuming Misty’s robots will, at some point, have something resembling opposable thumbs.

I had gotten to know Enwall from his days running smart home startup Revolv before their acquisition by Google, and earlier this year he went over to run Sphero’s new personal robot spinout. He’d gotten to know the founders of Sphero through being a part of the Boulder startup scene, which Enwall has been active part of since his days as CEO of pioneering home energy management startup Tendril.

Overall it was a fun and interesting conversation. Take a listen below, download here, or head over to Apple podcasts and subscribe.

June 1, 2017

Is Nest’s New Face Recognition Cam A Sign It’s Waking From Its Slumber?

One of the great mysteries of the smart home world over the past few years has been the relative quiet of Nest, the one-time connected home star that burst onto the scene with the launch of its impressive Nest Learning Thermostat and, two years later, a smoke and carbon monoxide detector by the name of Nest Protect.

After Nest got acquired in early 2014, updates slowed to a crawl, and much of the news that did come out from the company during this time was bad. While there was occasional news about Works with Nest and Thread, you were just as likely to read about management dysfunction under Tony Fadell and product recalls. The only wholly new product line introduced into the Nest family during this time was the Nest Cam, a product that, in reality, owes more to Dropcam (another acquisition by Google) than to internal development from Nest.

But now there are indications the company might be waking up from its long slumber. In a recent story in The Verge, Nest product manager Maxine Verson hinted that the rest of 2017 should be busy for the company:

Verge writer Vlad Savov writes, “Veron tells me Nest’s relative silence in recent times is about to be a thing of the past. “I am very excited about the next six months,” he says with a grin, “we’ll talk again soon and you’ll understand why.”

Savov goes on the speculate that the next product might be a cheaper home thermostat. A welcome addition to be sure, but I think for those who witnessed Nest’s early days of innovation, a lower-cost version of an existing product is hardly something to get excited about.

The product I’m excited to see is Nest’s long-rumored home security system. My own sources have confirmed the existence of this long-gestating project and, given Google’s patent filings in the space, I think a Nest home security system could be truly differentiated. Add in the fact they just introduced a camera with facial recognition capabilities – an interesting potential component of a smart security system – and we may be getting close.

Another potential product is a video doorbell. While the market is certainly crowded at this point, Nest’s brand name and recent development of a Pro group that supports home builders and integrators could help a Nest video doorbell get traction.

Whatever Nest does, chances are it’s been limited to a certain set of products by its parent company. Alphabet/Google has let non-Nest groups develop products in some of the most interesting areas – voice assistants and mesh Wi-Fi for example – while Nest has largely stuck with thermostats and cameras.

One thing is certain: the company’s new Nest Cam itself is a sign of progress. With it, the company has started to integrate image-based AI into its Nest cams, a potential indication that it – like Amazon – sees computer vision as one of the key new frontiers in the smart home.

And who knows? Maybe now – if the new camera and hints being dropped are any indication – maybe Nest truly has something new and interesting up its sleeves.

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.

February 14, 2017

Is The Anova Deal The Nest-Google of the Smart Kitchen?

Back in January 2014, I had just caught a ride to the Las Vegas Convention Center for the Consumer Electronics Show when I struck up a conversation with the two men in the back seat of the shuttle. They were executives from Nest, makers of the learning thermostat that had been the talk of the smart home industry for the past year, so I was naturally interested to hear what the company was up to at the big consumer trade show.

While we had a nice conversation, nothing stood out to me when I recalled the encounter a week later other than the two seemed to be in a pretty good mood. The reason I was even thinking about the chance meeting was I had just heard about Google’s acquisition of Nest for $3 billion, a huge sum of money and certainly enough to make any Nest executive happy.

I had similar thoughts a week ago when I first heard about Electrolux’s acquisition of Anova. I had just co-hosted a party with Anova at CES, and while everyone at the mixer had a good time talking smart kitchen with industry colleagues, the only indication from the Anova team that something may be in the works was everyone seemed to be in a good mood.

Last week’s news also got me thinking about other similarities between the two deals. Much like Nest at the time, Anova was the leading independent startup in a nascent but fast-emerging connected home market, and so their acquisition by a deep-pocketed and established player helps to validate their market just as Google’s acquisition of Nest validated the smart home.

Which naturally leads one to ask, “Does that make Anova deal the Google-Nest of the smart kitchen?”

The answer to that question is yes…and no. In other words, it’s a bit complicated.

In the way of similarities, both Anova and Nest were experiencing fast growth. Anova saw its sales double year over year in 2016 and is on the verge of a million customers in the first half of 2017, while Nest hit the million customer market just around the time of acquisition.

Both deals also came at a time when awareness of their specific markets – smart home and smart kitchen – was starting to seep into the broader consciousness of the early mass market.

And of course, both made connected products with really high levels of consumer satisfaction.

But there are some big differences, perhaps the biggest of which being the types of companies who acquired them.

Yes, both were deep-pocketed suitors, but Google and Electrolux are very different types of businesses with different motivations. For Google, their core business is data and information. Sure, they have dreams of a growing hardware business, but these efforts, including their more recent Google Home product, is often motivated by a desire to further their ability to gather and distribute information to consumers in new and interesting ways.

As the world’s second-largest home appliance maker, Electrolux’s business – and motivations – are much more transparent: With the acquisition of Anova, they now have a new precision cooking hardware line they can sell. Anova and other early precision cooking companies proved this is a legitimate segment and Electrolux now has the opportunity to enter this market in a big way.

But perhaps the biggest difference between the two acquirers is their platform motivations. Google clearly had platform aspirations with the acquisition of Nest, who’s technology they saw as the foundation for not only more of their own products, but as a platform around which they could offer to the broader industry to build third party products. Sure, the long and complicated story of Nest post-acquisition and the rise of newer approaches such as Amazon’s Alexa have changed the calculus a bit for Google and everyone else, but there’s no question that was the original vision.

For Electrolux, it’s clear they envision Anova’s product line as the foundation for more precision cooking and smart cooking products. And as is often the case when an established company buys a fast-growing startup, I could also see them trying to instill Anova’s innovation-centric startup culture and even let their newly acquired team take the lead on some of those efforts. But Anova’s precision cooking products are not a platform in the same way Nest products are a platform, nor were they intended to be, which is fine because Electrolux is not a platform company in the same way Google is a platform company.

There are other important differences. Valuations are much different today than in 2014. Hardware startups are not getting the same multiples we saw in early 2014. And while Steve Svajian and Anova’s team are hugely capable, Google paid a premium to get an exec team led by industry legend Tony Fadell, recognized as the father of the iPod, the previous decade’s defining consumer hardware product. And while Anova has certainly filed for patents for innovation related to its immersion circulators, Nest’s IP portfolio was fairly broad in the area of the smart home.

In summary, while these deals have some similarities, in the end, the acquiring companies had very different visions and motivations. Google’s platform-centric vision of the world meant Nest’s technology would soon be positioned as a de facto standard around which the industry choose to coalesce, while Anova’s technology will serve as a platform for a company of one – Electrolux – to launch themselves into the smart, precision cooking market.

November 6, 2016

Jenn-Air Wi-Fi Ovens Add Support For Nest

Often times in the smart home space, companies announce integrations or new functionality that seem…less than useful. Part of this is a result of the race to make the case to consumers that connected devices are going to make their lives better. But sometimes we hear about device integrations that not only seem like a good idea – but also just good common sense.

One example of this is an announcement this week from appliance manufacturer Jenn-Air that it has integrated Nest thermostat functionality into the Jenn-Air Wi-Fi connected ovens. The integration will allow the oven and the thermostat to talk to one another to communicate important information. If the Nest senses that there is no one home but the oven has been left on, it will send a quick notification via the Jenn-Air app to the user to let them know and give them the option to shut off the appliance.

The other integration is even more useful, allowing users to create rules that will change the Nest’s temp settings when the oven is set at a certain temperature. This is an aim to solve a fairly common problem – the kitchen and dining room areas getting too hot, especially in the warmer months, when the oven is on for long periods of time. The custom rules will allow Nest and Jenn-Air owners to be proactive and ensure the rooms remain comfortable during the cooking process. Perhaps the only thing missing from this announcement is an integration between the oven and Nest’s connected smoke detector. The oven is the culprit of many false (and maybe some real) smoke alarms, so an integration between a smoke detector and the oven to determine whether it’s appropriate to switch off the oven in the event of a real fire seems useful.

Jenn-Air has been an early appliance leader in the smart kitchen space, announcing earlier this year a strategic partnership with food data platform startup Innit to bring a new level of intelligence to cooking using their appliances. The new Nest integration will work through the Jenn-Air app and current Jenn-Air connected oven users will receive notification to update the app to the newest version, which includes the added Nest functionality.

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.

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