Tag: Amazon Echo

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Connected Objects

Say Bonjour to easier mornings with this smart alarm clock

It seems like every day, a new idea for a smart assistant hits the crowdfunding circuit, and for good reason: The utility of having one in the home is only growing with their expanding abilities.

While the Bonjour Smart Alarm Clock is one of these, what sets it apart is its use of artificial intelligence to learn a user’s routines and habits, integrate itself with smart home devices, and be totally controlled using nothing but conversational language. The device is designed to be used in the bedroom to facilitate an easier morning routine. By simply asking it, users can get an update on the weather, traffic, and news, control products like Hue lights and Nest thermostats, and even play music through Spotify.

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Smart Home

L.U.C.Y! brings digital assistants to the big screen

The effect of Amazon Echo’s voice-controlled versatility on the industry has led to consumers expecting competing products to offer as smooth of an experience — if not better. Creating that better experience is a tall order with how much the Echo can learn and do, but that’s not stopping the team behind L.U.C.Y. from trying.

While L.U.C.Y. is a digital assistant in the same vein as something like Amazon’s smart canister, the first and most obvious difference lies in its design: L.U.C.Y. boasts a large 17″ to 24″, tablet-like form factor with a Full HD, IPS-equipped display that sports a 1920 x 1080 resolution, an HD camera, a microphone, and facial recognition for different users.

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Smart Home

Get a grip on your connected life with the Moband gesture wand

Alternative forms of device control are all the rage now, and for good reason. Smartphones and other touch-based devices are great for communication but usually end up adding complexity when it comes to smart home control.

The team at iWave designed the Moband to give smart home enthusiasts or anyone looking to more easily control their connected home objects another way to do so. The gesture-based universal remote control comes with 10 preset gestures (e.g. swing up, down, left, right, rotate, etc.) or the ability to create custom gestures, all of which can be linked to the functionality of one or more remote controls already in the house.

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Imaging Wearables

Tribble is a wearable wunderkind for your place, person or plane

editors-choiceAll the devices required for a connected daily life make things
better. Unfortunately, many of them need to be constantly monitored as well. Notifications can add up, making things much harder later on when addressing 400 emails or 1,200 group text messages. So, it’s important to stay on top of it all; a little help couldn’t hurt.

The Tribble is a connected, wearable companion aiming to be an all-in-one intermediary between a user and their smartphone or other devices. Its small, round body is made of stainless steel for durability and houses a 2.0GHz Quad-Core AR Cortex A9 processor along with 1GB of RAM. This powers a combination of LED touchscreen, 1080p video camera, and motion sensors for the Tribble wide array of functionality.

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Smart Home

The ZOE smart home hub doesn’t echo your data in the cloud

With the Apple v. FBI court drama unfolding, it’s never been clearer how important the topic of individual privacy is. In this post-Snowden age, no one really knows where all these mass amounts of data are sent to and who gets to look at them, prompting many to take matters into their own hands. Protonet’s ZOE is a smart home hub specifically made for these people.

A lot of criticism levied against Internet of Things devices is their potential to be directly hijacked by hackers or government entities or have the data they generate compromised since these devices rely on less than secure cloud technology. ZOE is special, though, in that it’s completely cloud independent: everything ZOE does is processed directly on the hardware itself. So not only does ZOE control and organize all of the major smart home devices on the market now (with an open platform capable of connecting and controlling many more), it does so without compromising any user data.

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Connected Objects

KUMO desktop assistant tries to make you feel less lonely, winds up talking a lot

The modern age isn’t all its cracked up to be. While there are pretty incredible technologies being created every single day, the majority of people’s daily work is done on a single desk with a computer, some tools, etc., leaving lots of people alone while they work.

The team behind the KUMO hope their cup-sized little robot will be enough of a companion throughout the day to eliminate desk loneliness. Its different parts — a camera, microphone, LCD screen, speaker, battery, Wi-Fi module, and USB port — are all encased in a vaguely charming and eternally smiling plastic ghost body. With these parts, it can connect to social platforms and messenger apps like Facebook, Line, and WhatsApp and read out messages to users. In its Greeting mode, it can serve as a desktop assistant by recording messages left by others and pushing it to users’ smartphones while they’re away. In Security mode, KUMO turns into a desktop guardian by taking images and videos of moving objects scheming on valuables and pushing those out, too.

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