Summer is officially here. That means enjoying typical fun summer activities like going fishing, whipping out the deckchair, and failing to cultivate a beach bod again. It could also mean less fun things like noticing higher electricity bills thanks to the overworked air conditioners. Optimizing AC use is not an easy task, which is why the Ambi Climate 2 makes use of artificial intelligence to personalize ambient conditions. Apparently, a lot of people love how that sounds, evidenced by the over $138,000 the device has raised on Kickstarter so far.
The Ambi Climate was created by Ambi Labs, a Hong Kong-based company founded by Julian Lee, Paul Sykes, and Tim Chang. They state their mission as being a sort of ‘leave no man behind’ approach to technology, wherein aged appliances are given a makeover using modern innovation. With the second edition of the Ambi Climate, the aim remains to make air conditioners more energy-efficient and customizable.
The device achieves that with the help of AI software, which studies user comfort and the corresponding conditions to create unique profiles for them. It finds out how comfortable a user is at any given time via a mobile app, where you can tell the device how much its estimation of your comfort level differs from what it actually is. As you do that over different months and passing seasons, the AI learns your individual preferences and optimizes the temperature accordingly.
While user feedback is one way the Ambi Climate tweaks its own operation, it isn’t the only way. The device uses a variety of sensors to track such factors as humidity and sunlight. It also gathers data from the Web to understand weather trends during that time of year, clothing people are most likely to have on, and temperature variations at different times of the day. It uses all this information to deliver the most appropriate climate control automatically. According to the creators, that leads to as much as 30 percent savings in power bills.
Ambi Climate can be paired with air conditioners using the Ambi Climate App, which is available for Android and iOS users. Once that’s done, you can place the device in view of the AC and leave it to do its thing. The app also enables a geo-location feature; the Ambi Climate finds out when you’re about to get home and fires up the AC, so conditions are perfect as you walk in. You can tie those features in with other smart home IOT paraphernalia thanks to IFTTT and Amazon Alexa integrations.
Ambi Climate’s well-timed Kickstarter campaign set a now modest-looking goal of $50,000. The campaign has raised $138,000 so far and has until June 22 to further add to that number. You can reserve a unit of the device for $99 via Kickstarter. Deliveries will commence July, and batches will be shipped each month after that until October. And if you’re looking for more fun ways to experience the plentiful sunshine, you might want to check out the solar power-generating blinds or some interesting climate control technology.
