This week, smart home device maker Wyze sent an email to its 1.3 million current device owners explaining that it didn’t plan for cloud costs needed to provide free person detection for Wyze cameras. Thus, it is hoping to offset the increased costs … [Read more...]
It’s time for smart home devices to have local failover options during cloud outages
Earlier this week, a Nest outage lasted for 17 hours. Nest cameras didn't capture any video footage during that time. This downtime was likely a minor inconvenience, in most cases, if it was noticed at all. But for others who experienced some type of … [Read more...]
Can you run an OpenHAB or Home Assistant smart home in the cloud?
Typically, people who use either the OpenHAB or Home Assistant open source smart home platforms tend to run the software on their own computer or a low-cost Raspberry Pi. Can you actually run these on cloud platforms such as AWS, Google Cloud or … [Read more...]
On-device speech recognition on smart speakers: Only half of the cloudless smart home equation
When Google announced its "end-to-end, all-neural, on-device speech recognizer" for the Gboard phone keyboard two weeks ago, I was initially excited. That's because speech recognition can now run locally on Gboard, even without a network … [Read more...]
GE slims down and Otis tries Alexa in elevators
This week on the show Kevin and I speculate what digital assets GE will sell and discuss the sad bankruptcy of French smart home company Sen.se. After hitting the sad news, we talked about the latest HomePod feature expected in iOS 12 and the fact … [Read more...]