So…there’s yet another smart home assistant announced. The real question is, why is this important? There is already a myriad of other home assistant products that have been flooding the market. Alexa, Amazon’s Echo, Momo, Hayo, there are just a ton of home assistants that all do incredibly similar things. There’s even one built into a coffee table and doubles a fridge for crying out loud. Well, there are two reasons to look at this new smart gear: One; it focuses on privacy and security, and Two; Andy Rubin created it.
For those of you who need a quick refresher, Andy Rubin is the creator of Android, the operating system found in more than two billion smart devices across the globe. He also worked at Google to manage the robotics division until October 2014, in which he left his nine-year position at the company to start up a new company called Essential Products.
While Essential Products has been focusing on Phones for the past couple of years, their newest product is the Essential Home, a smart device that…well, is pretty much exactly like every other smart device for your home. It is voice activated, you can tap on the screen, or you can “glance” at it to activate it. The Essential Home can set timers, play your favorite music, dim your lights, remind you of important events on your calendar.
So what makes this smart home device different from the others?
Well, because of the many rising concerns of IoT devices being hackable, the Essential Home focuses more on Privacy and Security. “Your home is your private space and we want to make sure that your privacy is taken seriously,” says Dwipal Desai, Business Unit Lead of Essential Products. “We designed Essential Home to directly talk to your devices over your in-home network as much as possible in order to limit sending data to the cloud. Essential Home’s proactive assistant also runs its AI engine locally on the device. We will continue to work on innovative ways to make the device smarter without compromising privacy.”
So if you’re looking for a home device but want one that’s got an outstanding pedigree that isn’t from Google and Amazon, then this one might be for you. However, one cannot help but think that this device is coming out slightly after the hype of home devices has died down. Maybe after it’s release in the summer, there will be new features added to it to make it stand out more against the sea of other home devices.
