HomeTech.fm - Episode 353 - Making the Intelligent Home with CEO of Orro Colin Billings

Episode Date: June 4, 2021

This week on HomeTech: We chat with Orro CEO and founder, Colin Billings about how he is using AI to make smart devices smarter. Orro is a unique smart dimmer that has built-in sensors and touchscreen interface that all fits within a decora-sized wall plate. It's also packed with third party integrations and the ability to learn how your lights should be set based on your habits. Some quick follow up about the Apple lossless audio launch, IKEA/Sonos picture frames are coming, and Control4 adds OVRC into every controller.

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, June 4th, from Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast about all aspects of home technology and home automation, all that good stuff. This week, we got a deep dive into, or just a quick dive into, a couple of home tech headlines that came up over the last couple of weeks, last couple of days. But also, sat down earlier with CEO and founder of Oro, Colin Billings, for a quick interview. So you're not going to want to miss that. It's a really cool product and we're going to talk all about it. And of course, got big of the week this week. But first, I don't want you to forget, I've got to keep plugging these every week

till we get more people to show up. We've a couple more last week with a Home Tech Talks that we're having. It's hard to say. I should probably rename that. But last week, we talked about what happens when things go wrong, what things went wrong. There was a lot of discussion about particular products that may be challenging for any integrator to install. And we also talked a little bit about some DIY products that are challenging for everyone. So that's really cool to sit down and have those conversations with everybody. It's a great forum just to kind of like sit down once a week and just have a casual conversation. So if you want

to know how to join that, head on over to hometech.fm slash support and it takes you over to the patron page. You should be able to access the back catalog from there if I have them all uploaded. I think I do. Maybe not last week's, but I'll get it up there soon. But you can also, there's a link on there where you can sign up for Home Tech Talks. It's just a Zoom webinar and, you know, it's pretty casual. Log in. First half, we talk about, you know, things that have gone on that week. And then, of course, we typically have, if that doesn't go completely off the rails and we find our own topic, we usually have a topic that we can talk about.

So check that out, hometech.fm slash support and get you over there for the Hometech Talks. But let's jump into some Hometech headlines. Got a quick follow up from a couple weeks back. Apple has published a new support document on the website that dives a little deeper into the details of the upcoming launch of lossless audio on Apple Music. Apple now says that both the HomePod and the HomePod mini will support lossless audio after a future software update. So not even hardware, but future software update. This is a no brainer. There's absolutely no reason the two devices shouldn't or weren't included in the initial rollout of this, this, this announcement. Um, to me, this, if you take a step back, this screams like it's, this is actually poor management and siloed departments. Like that's what it screams to me.

Like this, this left hand isn't talking to the right hand. Um, and that's the kind of thing that you get. Like that's, you're going to get an announcement that gets botched like this. Um, I did hear that Apple was more excited,

um, about like having, uh, the Dolby Atmos stuff, uh, the spatial audio. And they, that's what the, they were hoping everybody would latch on to. But everybody latched on to the Lossless thing and then figured out,

hey, you can't use your earphones. You can't use your AirPods. You can't use your HomePod. What can we use to listen to this Lossless audio with? And it became a bigger story than it should have been. So bad rollout. Hopefully they learn a few things about rolling out. They're really good at rolling out products.

And when they miss, they swing and a miss. This is one of those things. So like I said earlier, lossless is still not the key feature for me on this rollout. But the spatial audio, which is what Apple is calling Dolby Atmos, I think that's going to be more noticeable for more people. It's going to put that technology, which has been put in front of people a lot in the past. Like we've had a number of like surround sound type standards that have come out over the years. And a lot of they, most all of them have failed. Like I think

super audio CD had some type of surround, like binarial or some kind of a surround sound that you could get along with it. And while it sounded really cool, like it really had a good noise floor and everything, really great quality recordings. Um, it didn't take off because you had to buy specialized equipment and all that good stuff with Apple. You don't really have to buy anything special for this, this spatial audio thing. Like it just, it's built into the phone. The phone decodes, it sends it to your headphones and you're good to go. You feel like you're going to be at that venue and everything. So I really think that's pretty cool. Hopefully, hopefully we'll see some more from Apple on that in the future. Confirming rumors from back in April, Ikea this week listed the new Symfonisk picture frame and with Wi-Fi

speaker product on its website. The device, which is listed for $199, has not yet been announced, but it's one of the two collaborations between IKEA and Sonos set for release in the very near future, evidently. According to the since removed webpage, let me put it up, took it down, the Symfony picture frame measures 22 inches high, 16 inches wide, and 2 inches deep. Now, IKEA says that customers will be able to choose between, quote, various interchangeable fronts, and the frame will be offered in either black or white finishes.

So I don't know. If you're watching the show, you can kind of see, and I'll put this kind of in the show art too, like you can kind of see the, I don't know, they had this weird like sectional cut of what this thing looks like. And it's got maybe this modern-ish looking artwork on it. I'm not sure. I still can't figure out what this product is or how it's going to work out. Like this is very strange. I can't picture the product from what the picture that they provided, I guess is what I'm trying to say.

So I'm really hoping that it, that it looks better than this, the picture that they posted, and that you can actually swap out. Maybe, maybe you can't swap out the canvases. Maybe the canvases are part of the speaker grill and that's just part of it. The story goes here. This is a story from The Verge. It goes on here. It says, like the previous two Symphonisk products, the picture frame is designed to blend into your home decor and not stick out as an obvious tech gadget. Notably, if you don't have any, you have currently have picture frames that have like a power cord coming out of them that won't be noticeable, but I suppose for everybody else, we're going to have to figure out how to hide that power cord away from the actual Sonos speaker. So I'm thinking these would be pretty cool. I may put some up in the garage here,

maybe one, maybe two. I don't know. I've got my, I've got a different setup today. So if you can see me on the video, you can see, there we go that way. You can see I've got a wall behind me and there's an outlet, kind of a pie, everything. So I'm, I'm getting ready for those, um, for the days of, of the, of the museum and the museum. Hopefully my idea is to put it behind me and, uh, that way you can see it back there. And, and, and when we have the show, you can kind of take a look and see what I've got on the shelves and that kind of thing. But I think the shelves are going to be Ikea shelves because why not? But also they, I can put in one of the little Sonos shelf things and have a speaker in there.

So I think that'll be kind of cool. Moving on, moving on. Well, I'm going to head and have a plan. This, this audio a little bit too much these days, but I don't have to play it.

In a story that has gained absolutely no attention whatsoever, anywhere else. Seven hugs and maker of the little touchscreen smart remotes, is officially calling it quits after just a few short years on the market. An email sent out to customers said the company was shutting down operations. Quote, due to, this is weird, due to market evolution, we made the difficult decision to discontinue the smart remote. All sales and manufacturing for the smart remote, the smart remote X, and the smart remote U have stopped.

And the warranties and support, well, those will continue through 2022. And after, I think the date was in June, your remote will just not function at all. So rest in peace, Seven Hugs. You've got the horns playing. Pretty sad, pretty sad. I actually have one of these and it's a good product. I really like the effort. This was a Kickstarter project from way back,

maybe like 2015, 2014. I know we covered it on the show a number of times. We had Simon on the show back in 2016. I want to say it's in the hundreds. You'd have to go back and insert. I'll had it controlling much more than like an Apple TV and a little crummy, like LG TV, just to kind of test and play around with, but it was well-made, but honestly, the lack of buttons, that's what got me. I couldn't, I could pick it up and I could use it. And it was kind of neat, like on the Apple TV, when you went to a section that had a keypad input, like the remote, you could turn it sideways and it had a keypad. You can type in, you know, on the screen. Unfortunately, without all the buttons and everything, it was just kind of hard to use. But a nice solution for some people, I'm sure.

Had some pretty innovative features. They had some like, they had a little disc that you could put up around your room and it would triangulate what you were aiming your remote at and try and control that device. So say you had a, you put up the sensors,

you had a TV entertainment system over there. When you pointed the remote at the TV, it would start controlling that. But when you pointed it over to the light, to your right or left, it should control that light. So really cool features. Um, cool product overall. Um, I'm not sure. So this, this is, this kind of brings on an extended conversation about the downfall of like Logitech Harmony now, like they they're shutting down seven hugs. Like,

where do you go if you need a universal remote? And we talked about this in our, one of our home tech talks a while back when we were talking about all the logic to harmony stuff that was going on. And the question that came up was like, do you even really need one? Um, CEC with the new HDMI 2.0 stuff has gotten a lot better. They seem to have fixed a lot of the issues, um, that came with like as an integrator, I would go out and I would, I would be like, turn off all the control, turn off all CEC. Like it was just something we did because it always caused problems. You know, you'd have a DVD player that got kicked on randomly and all of a sudden TVs would light up around the house, um, because all those CE signals would just go through and,

um, you know, pop propagate and go to all the TV. It was just weird. So we turned, we, we turned that little ghost creation off. But if you just got like a standard room with a newer TV, a Roku, Apple TV type device, you may not need to have a universal mode. I think you would know if you need one. So the question is like, where do you go from there? I've got a link to the Wirecutter article from the New York Times about what's the best universal remote. And they recommended one I hadn't really heard of before. It's called Sofa Baton, which sounds like someone used a thesaurus to generate a name for their product. Like, what can I use besides couch and remote?

And they just used the Microsoft thesaurus on it to figure out what they could rename their company to? I don't know. Very strange. But it looks like it works with IR and Bluetooth. So if those cover your needs, maybe it's something to look at. Kavo's still around. And evidently, it was actually in this article.

It was in extremely limited supply, they said. Like, you can't get them anywhere. So the article mentions it in the footnotes and says they may also not belong to the world. So I really don't know. I think Kavo had the best idea overall. Like, it was just like, you want input zero? Here, we'll give you input zero. We'll make a whole device dedicated for it and a whole remote and ecosystem around it.

And, well, like, you're going to get that with your TV for free in a couple of years. So it was kind of a tough sell. I think it still is a tough sell. I really like the product, the remote. Eh, not so much. It wasn't a very good feeling remote or comfortable remote to use, but overall, I like what they were trying to do. Just kind of taking over, they're replacing the receiver essentially, and just using the Kavo to actually do all the HDMI

switching and all the hard work. Great idea. I just don't know if it was a few years too late or too early. And here we're going to be, you know, getting what they are providing as a product just built right onto Samsung or LG TV. So it's really hard to say where they're going these days. A new Control 4 software update is adding full support for the Oversea Pro Remote Equipment Management. It puts the Oversea software on all Control 4 EA and CA series controllers. So that's pretty cool. The update offers dealers the ability to remotely manage and service clients Control 4 connected devices for service contracts, troubleshooting, reduced trucker roles, and greater system insight. We talked about oversee and what it means for this industry over the past, I don't know,

a long time, for years, it seems. And it seems like it is the one that has won out inside this industry. There's still a bunch of people out there still using DOMATs I know of. And all the other companies were bought up either by control four. Uh, so I, he, he, he was bought up by snap AV backpack was bought by control four and then control four was bought by snap AV. So like everything is essentially owned under snap AV. It's all going to oversee.

Let's just not pretend that the other two exist anymore. And you know, those brands would just disappear off the face of the planet. I actually found an iHeG controller the other day. So I've got one for the museum. I'll put it up there because it'll be nice. But the, this, this is one, this, this is nice. This seems like low hanging fruit for Control 4 and SnapAV to do. It's definitely, what I would think is SnapAV's biggest brand along with, well, along with Control4 and merging those two together. This just makes sense.

And, uh, SnapAV is committed to getting that overseas software into everything they own. You know, they own Control4. So now that they have, uh, have that in, uh, have that in, it's just another, you know, check box off that list. Um, this, I, what I think this is to me, this marks a milestone in what control for and snap AV are doing. Uh, snappy, they, they were both pretty big companies. Like they're both pretty big ships and it takes a long time to turn those ships. Um, especially when you have an acquisition. So, uh, what were they acquired probably a year or two ago now we we saw like, it probably takes a year

to kind of move people around and get everything lined up, like change personnel out, that kind of thing. And then it takes another year to kind of get projects on the board and working on, not to say that Control 4 hasn't released anything, but now I'm starting to see a lot more come from Control 4 Snap AV. And I think we're going to see more faster development out of them once they start firing on all cylinders. It's just taken them a while to get Control 4 out of being that public company into private hands and swap everybody around, swap management around, and get on to new things.

So it's pretty neat. Other quick notes on this update. It's got a bunch of like dealer centric tools in it for, for troubleshooting, which I love. Um, so they've got like a Zigbee health dashboard and stuff built in where you can kind of get an overview and figure out if something's wrong, uh, with the Zigbee network, which is what control for users for their lighting and stuff like that. Um, that's really cool. Zigbee is kind of like this nebulous thing. We've had the ability to kind of get in and see like signal levels and that kind of thing for a number of years now. But anything they can do to make this easier is the better. a cables. You could try swapping out the equipment. Uh, there was really no way to get in there and test what was going on and what's,

what's actually making this problem worse. And now you have HDMI testers and most dealers can get access to one that can, that can generate 4k signals and that kind of thing. So, um, having the tools is essential to somebody who is being paid to understand why the system is broken. So anything like this, I absolutely love for them to have this is also another bullet point on here for giving dealers an easier way of accessing and downloading logs that are on different devices without being connected to the same network. Again, all goes back to troubleshooting. These are all great updates in my book, not so much for the end user to see. There's not much there. But I don't know.

To me, this is for tech. This is what we need to actually do our jobs correctly, right? If somebody's paying you to show up to their house, and they say, well, what's wrong with my system? And you're like, I don't know. I can't pull the logs from here. I'm going to have to drive out to your house. Maybe you'd be able to solve that through Oversea wire and get it fixed before you, before you need to

roll a truck out. Or if you get on site, um, maybe you can use the Zigbee dashboard here and figure out something while you're playing around with the devices on site. So all good stuff. I'm just glad, glad to see them, uh, glad to see them put this stuff in, but also like, I think, I think this is one of those milestones for Control 4 and SnapAV. Seems like the first, like, first big initiative that they put two of their big products together. And I don't think that should go unnoticed. I think that's a big, like I said, big milestone in those two companies coming together. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 353.

Trying to remember that number there. And don't forget, you can join us in the chat room live Wednesday, starting sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. And with that, I do want to kind of jump into the interview here that we had with Colin Billings, the CEO and founder of Oro. It's really cool. This device is really nice looking.

I mean, it's a Decora, a single gang Decora light switch slash dimmer that's just got a lot of smarts built into it and is more useful than most smart outlets. And we talked a lot here, and I'll let the interviewer speak for itself, but one of the cool things they're doing is using AI to augment the smart intelligence that are in kind of this regular dimmer

and making things more intelligent, making things more automatic. So I think that's a really, really cool plan. So without further ado, here's Colin Billings, CEO and founder of Oro. Hey, Colin, how's it going? Thanks for joining us. Hey, Seth. Thanks for having us on. All right. Well, Colin, you're the CEO and founder over at Oro. I guess before we get started talking about Oro specifically, let's talk a little bit about you, how you got into this industry and what brought you into developing a product,

a smart home product like Oro. Well, Oro, getting started on Oro and working on Oro really was a sort of a solution or a curiosity of a personal experience. I was in 2014 having a huge difficulty with sleep and I was trying to figure out different ways to sleep better, buying things on Amazon and everything like that. And I got recommended a computer program called Flux for my computer, which adjusts the brightness and color temperature of your screen based on where you are and the time of day. And I started sleeping better. And that was kind of my first clue of how important light was to how we feel throughout

the day, whether it's having energy or feeling ready for sleep. And that was really sort of got me onto a hobby, which was trying to build a flux-like experience for our home in San Francisco. And I thought at the time, this was in 2015, that you should be able to do this with smart bulbs and maybe a server running some rules in the closet. And I quickly learned that that really wasn't where the technology was. And it really sort of put me interested in sort of how home lighting, how lighting in general is being managed as it became more digital. And that's really where Oro came to be, was first and foremost a picture about how lighting could actually be a

seamless part of our lives. And that ultimately ended up being a system built around light switches, which is Oro today. Right. Very cool. Very cool. Well, it's a neat product. I have to tell you, I was putting together our show notes that we were going to talk about today. I was putting together a list of questions for you. And I was reviewing the website. Um, and, uh, my wife snuck up over my shoulder this morning and asked me a question and she said, Hey, what's that? I said, Oh, it's Oro. It's a, it's a little smart. It's a smart device. It's a smart, smart switch essentially. She goes, Oh, your stuff usually doesn't look, look very good. So stamp of approval there. But go ahead and tell us a little bit about Oro, the design decisions behind how it's made, because it's a unique design in

that it's, it's basically a touchscreen that fits into a Decora switch space. Yeah. Well, what we're trying to do at Oro is really create a unified, you know, smart home system that brings wellness-oriented smart lighting, home control, energy efficiency, and home monitoring all in a single package. I think what it sounds like your wife was impressed by is that we've started all of this from a human-centric design approach and figuring out what people really want and how they want it to work in their homes. And that is, I think, what has really distinguished Aura. One is that we've taken a sort of invisible as much as possible approach to what we do,

right? We really don't want you to see technology. I don't think anybody cares to see technology. They just want to live with the benefits. And so that's resulted in us finding the light switch as really one of the most seamless ways to build these types of experiences into any building and into your home. So the Oro system is really both software and hardware, but at the hardware element, it replaces light switches or goes where you would

install a normal light switch. And the current hardware that you see today, which is the core of the Oro system, is our first product. And that really combines the human-centric lighting and home control value propositions into a single product. So first and foremost, when you install Oro, you really never home and learning how those different patterns reflect on your preferences for lighting and just do that automatically so whether you're walking down the hallway at 9 a.m or at 1 a.m in the morning you're just getting the amount of light you need or want not just you know what most other systems do which is maybe turn the light on or not respond at all but then on top of that there's a touch screen and that allows Auro once it's controlling your lights to then become a place for controlling other things in

your home. And so you can connect your locks, your doorbells, your thermostats, really all of these really core smart systems of your home into Auro and control it from anywhere, whether it's a light switch, whether it's your voice, whether it's from our mobile apps, um, it really unifies the home into a simple and easy to use system. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You can, you can see that the webpage does a really good job of showing that off. It's the things kind of like sliding in and out of it. You can see all of the little, I don't know if you want to call them apps or something. I guess everything is called an app these days, right? But there's different little interfaces that you can go back and forth to on each on each individual slider. But let's let's talk about the equipment real quick. I did notice one thing that you have thought of that a lot of light switch companies for some reason

kind of skip over is is kind of the aspect of like wiring in for three ways and four ways and that kind of thing. It, it looked like from what I, what I was reading that you guys have thought about how this works and your, the Oro switches themselves are compatible with that three way and four way lighting. That's right. You can basically use Oro with any, you know, N way compatible circuit, right? And so that means whether it's controlled by two light switches or five light switches or however many you have, you can use Oro. Um, and so you, you wire it in with a parallel wiring, and then the Oro switches actually talk

to each other wirelessly, and sort of virtually control that. And one of those is actually controlling the load, right? So the power to the light, and then the rest of them are really relaying information back to that main control from a lighting control perspective, and all in sync.

So, you know, if I walk past the light switch coming out of all way, I will turn the light on and then walk over to the one by the sliding glass door and turn it off. And they all work together, whether that's just a simple three-way or more complicated. It's worth pointing out for those folks who sort of have different setups that we also support what's

called simple multi-way. So as long as the Oro switch is on the location right before the light, you can actually use traditional toggle switches on all the rest of your multi-way switches and even turn them on and off and control the lights through that. And so we do some special stuff there on understanding how the electricity will change in the circuit

when that happens so that you can actually use Oro how you want to in your home. We've really focused on making it flexible so if i have 10 switches that control one light i don't need to get 10 oros in other words right is that what you're saying you don't have to yeah okay yeah that's great yeah i mean i mean it's just i mean yeah it's it's not so much a um like it's not good for you guys because i'm sure you'd more rather sell the 10 but it it makes way more sense for most people who have those types of circuits. Maybe it's like an outdoor light that you can switch from multiple locations.

The main one you come to most of the time are the ones you're going to want to have that Oreo installed at. And the one in the bedroom that you never use, it would kind of be a waste of money to do. And you could buy that Oreo and put it somewhere else in your house. That's exactly right. I mean, our philosophy kind of, you know, in addition to design is openness, right? And that means it's your home. You should make it work how you want it to work.

And that means we work with the brands that people care about. That means that we make decisions like this, which just says like, look, like, yes, we might want to sell another Switch, but you as a customer, you as a professional installer don't want to use that. So like, why would we make it more difficult for you?

Yeah. And we want to open it up. And it really helps blend the technology in with the rest of that. Because, I mean, let's like I have smart lighting in my house, but not every switch is a smart light. And it really helps blend in with the rest of the house when you don't have, you know, mismatched things around the house. There's the Auro smart switch. But if I go over here, it's still just a regular toggle switch that I'm used to, even though it's integrated in with the Auro. So that's a great idea. And it'll let you do a lot more advanced smart lighting in your home

than you can get from a lot of these. If you wanted to buy one of these expensive, a radio raw system, a homework system, a vintage lighting system, what has previously been considered the top of smart lighting or connected lighting. Those were all like, I have to do my entire home or nothing approaches. And so with Oro, you really have that flexible, you can go room by room, you can go switch by switch, however you want to start and then eventually expand your system, we're really there to sort of make it as simple and easy for you as possible. So I, on the installation level, if I'm, if I, I go to your website there, buy an Oro or a pack, cause I noticed you sold them in packs and you can actually get them less if you buy them in, in, in like a five pack or something. Um, if I buy that, how, what, what is the unboxing experience?

What does it look like when I pull it out of the box and then I'm ready to install it? Yeah. You, I mean, you open the box, you're going to see something that, that looks like a light switch, but feels like a smartphone in terms of quality of build and everything else. Like it's obviously electronic device. Um, but it runs, uh, as a seamless replacement for a traditional light switch. So when you flip it over, you're going to see four. We designed a connector that allows you to just push the wires in from your wall instead of having to deal with wire nuts or screwdrivers or any of these other things.

But, you know, the installation is really just like a normal light switch. Turn off your power for safety. Disconnect your old light switch. You know, we work with four wire junction boxes. So that does require a neutral wire. You plug those exact same wires that were connected to your previous switch into Oro, put it back in the wall, flip your breaker, and then set it up with a mobile app.

So it's really, just like any connected product, you're going to do something with an app, but ours is super minimal there. And all you're doing really there is sort of making sure that we know what type of light we're attached to so that we dim it appropriately and optimally for you. And then connecting us to the network so that we can do software updates and otherwise.

Right. And also integrations with other devices. I'm sure you need Wi-Fi for that as well. It's not like inside. Not everything is contained inside that Oro piece. And not every other device could talk to you if it tried. Like there are plenty of devices that only talk to cloud for integration. So what does that process look like there? And what devices are you compatible with?

There's quite the list on your website. Yeah, so we sort of try to work with everything that matters for most home consumers, right? And so we're not trying to integrate the most obscure thermostat possible. We're working with Nest, Honeywell, Ecobee, right? And so, you know, we're not trying to integrate, you know, the most obscure thermostat possible. We're working with Nest, Honeywell, Ecobee, right? And it's just sort of true for all of the different what we call skills. And so we have, you know, climate, so, you know, control your temperature, we have access, so connect your doorbell and your connected locks. We have media control, so things like controlling your Sonos speakers and what's playing out of them, um, through to a set of other, you know, integrations with, um, other smart home devices, both,

you know, devices in your home that you want to control, but also things you might want to connect them to like Alexa or Google assistant. Um, the only things that you have to do in order for setup is, you know, obviously most of these require a wifi network connection, right? We can't talk to Sonos without having a way to talk to them. And so, you know, you need to have that sort of wireless, you know, infrastructure in place. A lot of them, if we can go local, we'll go local. So Sonos, for example, talks directly to your speakers, not talking to the cloud. Other companies like Nest, for example, you can only talk to them, you know, via the cloud. And so we try to go local where we can. We think it's better for everybody to be able to do local.

We hope more people do local, but we make sure that you can do all of these things. You open up the mobile app, you go to a section for integrations, you pick your integration, like, you know, hey, let's say, you know, Ecobee thermostat, you just authenticate, you know, directly from the mobile app with Ecobee, and then it appears on your Auro switches. And then you have a full set of customizations. So we call what appears on the Auro switch a face. And you can go to any individual Auro switch and say, hey, I want, you know, I only want my thermostat on this one in addition to my lighting, or I want five faces on this one. You can completely customize that and order that how you want from the mobile app on iOS and Android. It's extremely flexible from the world I come from where it's hard buttons.

And how many hard buttons do you want? And once they're there, that's pretty permanent. You can't reverse it, but it costs money every time you do it. This is very flexible in the fact that you can just set what you want. When I was getting started in the industry, I was absolutely shocked. Like I almost fell over when I learned that when they're like installing these physical keypads, they leave them blank for like three or four months, right? Because you don't know what your scenes are gonna be, right?

And how you're gonna live and like what that is. And so then you have to pay your installer to come back again and actually program your scene and then engrave your keys. And so I just sort of felt like that was an anachronistic component of the world that, you know, with a touchscreen, we're able to sort of break up. And so now you can create scenes, whether it's for one room or your entire home, just from a mobile app.

And it appears immediately. It seems more like it should be in the future, right? And we hope that that sort of digital sort of surface becomes a lot more than just even what it is today. Right. You've got a lot of future forward-looking things here that I do want to get to, and we're edging into software. But I've got to ask, because I wouldn't be a proper integrator,

I wouldn't be a proper developer, I didn't ask if there's any kind of API or SDK for third-party integrations to bring in product to integrating directly with Aurel. Yeah. So again, on the openness front, we just launched, it's in beta, invite only for customers. I'm losing my lights. I should put them in my office, a local API, right? So you can control the lights. You can discover all the oral light switches. You can understand their state.

You can actually even pull sensor data from that. So we're telling and alerting people that are using the API, hey, there's presence in your living room right now, or there's now presence in the master bedroom. And that's, you know, so we really think that you're installing these sensors. You know, it's not only for us, it's for you you too and so our pros are really starting to take advantage of that and so you can really sort of you know for those those people that are helping you know either doing themselves in like a home assistant sort of world or or or people that are help setting up similar

types of systems where there's sort of if thenthen statements like, hey, raise the blinds when presence is detected in the kitchen. Those are not captive to us. We share them with everybody. Nice. Yeah, that's very cool. And okay, so now we've got to talk about the difference between, and you have this on your website, but I definitely want to touch on this. You guys have programmed almost like some AI into the switches here where when they detect presence, they can actually act on that later on. So I'll give you an example, and this may be a bad example, but from what I've gotten from the website, if you're in a room every day at 5 o'clock and have a light at a specific level,

Aura remembers that and automatically does it and adjusts the light for you at that specific level later on. And so you don't ever have to really interact with the light switches anymore. That's really cool. That's right. You know, like one of the best examples that kind of explain like kind of how this works is like just talking about my morning. So I'm an early morning person.

I'm up usually between 4.30 and 5. And it's dark, right? And so Auro's turning on just a little bit of light in that morning so I can make my cup of coffee and I can get down and start writing on my email or whatever I'm going to do first thing in the morning. And if my daughter doesn't wake up between then and 7 a.m., that room is actually getting brighter and my needs for light are changing. And Oro is automatically sensing those changes, understanding what it's learned about me from a preferences and changing the light. And if I were to stay in that room until there's enough natural light, it'll actually even turn off, right? Because it'll say, look, like we're not going to add any more here and we're just wasting electricity by being on. And so really Oro is in sync with

both your activity in a room and the amount of light that's either possible from the lighting, you know, the lighting sources in that room or natural light and mixing those things back. And, you know, think about having a lighting engineer for you all throughout the day. Right, right. Yeah, this is something you touched on a little while ago when we were talking about engraving and, and, and what I called, uh, and what I've called for most of my career, lifestyle programming. And it's something as a programmer, when I went back into somebody's house to, to programming the lighting scenes, I had to guess at, it was, it was shooting in the dark. And sometimes, um, most of the times I'd get it wrong and I'd get a phone call and say, Hey, this, this light's too bright for us. It's eight o'clock at night. Can you knock it down some?

And I'd have to remote in or come back and fix that. But this product and with these sensors and the feedback mechanisms that you've programmed into it looks like it tries to learn that lifestyle programming from the end user. And that's really smart. I mean, what we were really surprised early on, when we were sort of developing and doing the R and D on this was that, you know, people, you know, they don't like to sit in rooms that are the lights not right, you know, within probably plus or minus 10%, right? So if it's off by, you know, let's say, you know, you want it at 75, it's at 50 people change it, right? So you got a really good signal around people's preferences in the early days, right? And so, you know, after about 14 days, we see most of our systems go to roughly 80 to 90% autonomous decision-making around the lighting.

So that means you're really not interacting with your light much at all. But then there was another thing that we learned over time, which is that you had to make sure not to just stay stuck in a rut because people's patterns change, right? You know, like it goes from summertime where your kids are running around and going to camp and life is a certain way to school is back in the morning.

Everybody's up at 630 in the morning and out the door at seven, right? And so like we actually had to build in and learn how to do this where it sort of adapts with your life, right? So, you know, the first time your patterns change, we may not know, but, you know, really soon after that pattern has started to reestablish a new direction, we're catching up really quick. And so, you know, that I think is kind of what the home needs to be, right? You know, like connected home is really about remote control. Like I need to think about it and I'm going to pick up or talk to something to turn it on. Whereas like what we really want is

the home to sort of be supportive of what we're trying to do right now. And there's a lot of information about how to do that if you're just paying attention to the right things. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned families because there's a lot of companies that develop product. Hold my favorite remote to hate up right here. Develop product for maybe a single person that lives in a San Francisco apartment. And they don't think very much past that use case. So it's very nice to hear someone, it's refreshing actually to hear somebody talk about how a technology piece could adapt to a family's changing calendar because boy, have they ever over the last year. Yeah.

And I don't think any programming that I could have come up with and stuck in at the end of 2019 could have lasted all of 2020. That's for sure. Yeah, it's been really interesting. So I've got a two and a half year old daughter at home, almost a little bit older than that. And her bedtime right now is 8pm. And so if you actually watch our house, like the lights in our house will actually start to dim down because we started like, you know, trying to help her go to sleep. And they'll go down to a low level from

about eight to nine, which is when she's like, hopefully in bed and not always in bed, but hopefully in bed. And then, you know, as the night goes on, it raises up just a little bit before dipping back down again, because we like to have low lights before going to sleep. And that's all just been learned by Oro and us, you know, doing what we always have done, which is control a light switch from a light, you know, control lights from a light switch, right? We're not using an app to program it. You can, and we learned from that. But like, you just walk up to the light switch and say like, look, I want it to be darker. Boom.

That's all you have to do to teach it. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. And so the sensors that are in each individual Oro, if I have multiple around the house, do they all work together as part of that AI type system that you have set up? So we're working on pushing into more and more in that direction. So right now, most of the sensing, so there's a motion sensor. We detect audio through a microphone, which is like, hey, I'm sitting and so there's a motion sensor, we detect audio through a microphone, which is like, hey, I'm sitting and watching TV, a motion sensor is not going to see anything or

hear any see any signal. So we need to sort of combine that to get a better sense of whether you're there or not, and what activities happening is on a space by space basis, right? So like you, you create your own home, you know, topography, right? And the switches that are together are sort of contributing to that one space. But now we're starting to look at ways that we can say like, look, like when we see Seth get up in the middle of the night and he walks down the hallway, we know that he's probably going to the kitchen, right? Like 98% of the time when this happens, you're going to the kitchen and how we can sort of start predictively initiating lighting for you through your home. So, you know, that sort of future scientific, you know,

whatever sci-fi version of that, where it just like lights up as you walk along is something that's totally possible now. And we're really excited about kind of opening up that. I, I'm not, I'm going to draw a blank remembering this show that was, that would, that I always refer back to, I've literally done it a half dozen times on this show. Uh, but it was, uh, I want to say it was like a, um, uh, a show about astronauts going to Mars for the first time. And it was briefly on like Hulu or something. Um, Sean Penn was the star. I remember that cause it had some big names in it, but in there they, they, I believe they got lighting, right. They, they got lighting. When you walked in the room, the lights came on.

And it wasn't anything. It was kind of just like I noticed it because I'm looking for that kind of stuff. But I also noticed it because it was so natural for the actors to just walk in the room and the lights were on. Or they'd say lights on and the lights would turn on. And I really think that something like this comes pretty close to what we were seeing there as, you know, fictional based off into the future somewhere. And it sounds like you guys could get there pretty quick. Yeah, no, I know exactly what you're talking about. And I had the same reaction when I saw it.

I was like, it's the first representation of, of what I think lighting should be like. There's another good one, which is her. If you sort of watch some of the apartment scenes there where it's just really responsive, right? This is what, you know, the combination of, of, of the right sort of sensors, you know, the right sort of software and experience design can really sort of just make your home respond in that helpful and supportive way.

Right. Like, you know, it's like even something like what they did with locks where, you know, where you can walk up to the door and it uses Bluetooth and unlocks the door as you're walking up. Those types of sort of ambient, helpful automations is like where the next step for the industry is, right? Because nobody wants to manage it. Nobody wants to think about it anymore. And the question is how we get to accuracy and helpfulness and doing that on a very reliable basis. Right. To me, it tripped me up because none of it was a gimmick. Right. and helpfulness and doing that, you know, on a very reliable basis.

Right. None of it to me, to me, it tripped me up because none of it was a gimmick. Right. They didn't walk in the room. They go, you know, yo, so and so turn on my lights and then look over the camera and wink like it was it was like it was just natural. It was the flow of things. You walk in the room, the lights turn on, you wake up in the middle of the night, you tap a lamp anywhere on the lamp and it, you know, and and it triggers lamp and it triggers lights to go out to the bathroom and that kind of thing. Or you wake up, like you said, and you're walking down the hall and the lights are following you down to go to the kitchen. That, I think, is a great idea of where we could be in the future. And we're not going to get there without all of these sensors being built into devices like yours. So it's really cool to see a product like this come along. One thing I noticed, going back to

your website, that you guys have a pro channel set up now. Can you give me a little information about what that's about? Yeah. So we've been, for the last about a year and a half, focusing more and more on our work with professionals. And that ranges everybody from homeowners, I'm sorry, home builders to your professional installer. And really what I think we're all part of as an industry right now is a massive growth of the sort of mainstream interest in smart home, where there's an infinitely larger amount of people that will spend a few thousand dollars for the benefits of smart home that would never spend thirty thousand dollars doing that. And so Aura really sort of provides that centerpiece or backbone for a system and allows you to connect in your favorite systems. And, you know, like I said, you know, whether it's sound system or whether it's your climate or et cetera, you know, really that that that that automation platform that was needed from some of the legacy companies offering that, you know, is now at a price point that just doesn't fit where everybody is interested.

And so, you know, we've seen a really huge amount of interest in the professional industry. It's really looking to sort of do more jobs. You know, maybe each individual one's a little bit less valuable from a revenue perspective, but you're doing a lot more of that, right? So, you know, trading off doing, you know, five, $6,000 jobs in a week versus working on one third of a $25,000 project, like you're getting, you're ending up, you know, sort of helping the installers that way. And in the end, it's the end consumer because you're getting the benefits of this in your house, right? You're more comfort, ease, convenience, energy efficiency and security at a price point that is more in line and I mentioned earlier, you can get, I'm looking at the website now. It's a, it's a five pack. I said five pack, it's three pack and a six pack of these. So, um, first off the single is one 99. The starter pack is, is three, uh, three switches for five 40 and nine 64, six switches. Um, that's,

that's a pretty good deal. You can save some money by, uh, buying the larger packs there. You can definitely save some money by buying more. Um think what Auro is doing as a system is really a value that can't be beat, right? If you just think about one Auro switch in a room, you're getting an intercom system, you're getting a smart speaker with Alexa, you're getting a smart dimmer with a motion activated sensor, you're getting home scene control, you're getting a smart display, like the list goes on and on with what you're getting, you know, from Oro. And so, you know, we're clearly not trying to be your low cost connected smart switch, right? And we're really trying to provide that unified home experience in a way that's both actively helpful, and then also gives you that sort of really simple controls for the things

that you want to get perfect. And so, you know, at that price, I don't think you can do it any other way for a cheaper number. It's actually a really good price considering all of the things that you do get in that, you know, I don't have to put in an Amazon piece in every room or a Siri HomePod in every room. Like I can just put one of these in and I have access to being able to control my music.

Like you said, there's Alexa built into it. It's more than one device that you get for one device, which is always a great thing. And as you mentioned before, like we work with a lot of other products openly, right? And so even on the lighting side, right? So we have a capability called third-party lighting control, which means we take the intelligence of Oro

and apply it to connected switches. So you could even use Oro on just one switch, right? I mean, we have customers, many of them, that are putting Oro on every switch. But if you wanted to sort of have a hybrid system that uses a Caseta product or a Leviton product, all of those things can be incorporated into your Auro system, just like a thermostat or other sort of third-party

device. The only difference is that it's a lighting product. And we know a lot about how to do lighting in this sort of responsive and supportive way. And we take that smarts and send it over to your connected devices as well. You're making, what I used to say is, well, we've got to make the dumb switch smart, but now you're making the smarter switches smarter. You know, the Casetas, the Control 4s of the world, they don't have these sensors built into them that you do. And without that feedback,

there's really not any other way to get this kind of intelligence built back into the system where it can help you. That's brilliant. You're basically tied to either like trying to build a bunch of things with IFTTT or something like that, or, you know, or, or routines or schedules, right? Sort of like, Hey, turn on at 7 PM, whether or not that's the right thing to do. It just doesn't, you know, and that's kind of the limitations of, of what I think most people are referring to when they say smart switches. You know, we really call ourselves a smart living system. Right.

We're sort of trying to take the raw atomic parts of a much more intelligent, smart home. We build a lot of that into our device, but we can also allow you to take that and use it with the other devices that you want in your home. Excellent. Excellent. Well, Colin, I want to thank you for coming. We're running up against our time here and I want to thank you for coming on. We're running up against our time here. And I want to thank you for coming on the show, first of all. But if somebody is interested in getting an Oro 2 or 3 or 6, where would they go? You go to our website, which is www.getoro.com. And if you're a professional installer, home builder, just do that same URL slash pro and you can find out how to connect with us on our trade programs.

Excellent. Yeah. I was about to say, if somebody wanted to find out more about the trade programs, they would go there. I think the link is all the way at the bottom. It says pro on it and you click that and heads on in there. That's right. Very cool. Well, Colin, thank you so much for joining us here and we appreciate it. Thank you so much, Seth. And that was Colin Billings, CEO and founder of Aurel. Really cool product. I've got a nice little picture of it here. I showed many of the different interfaces that they have. Really, I keep forgetting this has intercom built in. It's really cool. Like you can have intercom in every room that you, that you,

if you need it, it's right there. It's perfect. So that's a pretty good idea. I really do like what they're doing with the sensors and the AI stuff. It's very unique. And it's having the ability to kind of like mimic what you were doing with your system. It just makes sense. Like that's, we don't have like currently with the smart home, putting it in quotes, you can't really see it very well, but we don't have that feedback mechanism of getting those sensors and everything back in to feed the, like what they would call AI and the other system. With these sensors and everything, what they, what they'll be able to do to train these devices to work correctly. It's going to be huge. So it's very, very exciting, very cool product.

Like I said, very good-looking product, too. And I know that they have a bunch of stuff on the horizon, too. I talked to Colin a little bit after the show. He shared with me a couple more things that they're hoping to do. And, yeah, there's a bright future. Pun intended, I guess bright future uh for these guys uh in the years to come so uh with that let's uh let's jump into the pick of the week and i got a got a different one here um i saw this yuffie uh which is a

a brand that we talked about in the last couple weeks weeks is it's, it's anchors smart home brand. So anchor a and KER they're known for, I probably have a half dozen anchor chargers laying around. They make pretty good chargers. They have the Yuffie line and a couple of weeks back they had a problem with, with some of their like 700 of their cameras of all the cameras or their clients cameras showing up on other people's devices. Not a good security thing to have happen.

Sounded like a bad deployment. What impressed me was how quickly they fixed things and how upfront and open they were about it. A plus, A plus in reacting. Mistakes happen, and those are forgivable. What wouldn't be forgivable is if, say, you created a smart home product and didn't communicate with your customers while your system was down, cough wink. That's probably unforgivable. But Eufy seems to be pretty good. And they came out

with these, they announced these new solo cams. Didn't bother covering in the Home Tech headlines because I thought this was actually pretty cool. They come in 1080p and 2K resolution. These are wireless cameras. But what I liked about these were they were designed to have both local storage and they could connect to the cloud, but they don't need a separate hub.

So it's just kind of a standalone device. You can get on there. It's got all the cameras have eight gigabytes of local storage, which Eufy says can hold two months of video. And it says you can get four months of battery on a single charge, which is just kind of cool. So it's your wireless, completely wireless cameras. And I'm thinking like four months, that's, that's incredible, first of all. But I can't tell you how many times in the, in the past, you know, 10 years ago and moving back, I was approached by some, somebody developing a building or developing a house or,

and they wanted to have like a security camera up to see what was going on at the house. This is it right here. And these things started like a hundred dollars. So there's a 1080p E20 out mid June for a hundred dollars. Solo cam 2 2K in June for $129. It looks like it stretches all the way to August for their S40, which is their 2K camera. It goes $199. So it's going to be a little bit before all of this stuff hits the market, as you should be expecting with every electronic piece out there right now. Things are tightening up. They're getting very, very tight. We're starting to finally see stories

about it. In CEPRO, we've been ringing this bell here from the beginning of the year, but you're finally starting to see stories about things getting tight and lots of posts on forums about people not being able to find receivers or anything like that. So we've got a ways to go and it looks like we've got a little bit further, but in the meantime, maybe grab one of these little cameras and see how well they work for you. I think it's a, I think it's a pretty cool product. Honestly, it seems like it's got a lot going for it. And like I said, I can't remember how many times I was approached in the past about setting up some type of camera. They had Wi-Fi at the job site or something like that. They just wanted to security camera up.

There you go. $100 later, $200 later, you're good to go. And if you have any feedback, comments, picks of the week, or great ideas for the show, you can reach out to us at hometech.fm slash feedback and fill out the online form or email feedback at hometech.fm. And I want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able

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but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and other supporters of the show can gather every day and chat about, I'm trying to think what we were talking about. There, there's been a lot going on about these remotes, uh, disappearing and, and, and different things that have been going on lately. I think one, somebody was thinking about just buying a remote. And it's like, probably not a good time to buy one of those 7HUGS remotes. So maybe avoid that one.

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But we'll be talking about security and security camera we talked about for the big of the week. But we'll be talking about security in general. There's a for the big of the week but we'll be talking about security in general there's a lot going on in that in that industry believe it or not both on the pro and diy side things have changed since i've been in that industry um there's a lot of self-monitoring stuff that looks really cool these days so i want to talk about that um so any any patron at any level get you invited, uh, get, get you the ability to, to join those talks. Um, if you want to help out the show, but it can't support the show financially, totally understand, appreciate a five-star review in iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast

app of your choice. And with that, that wraps up another week of home tech news and home tech headlines. And, um, had a great time talking with Colin about Oro. That was a it's a really cool product. I think I'm gonna have to pick up a couple of those. Put them in a couple of key spots throughout the house, especially knowing that they have the ability to talk to other smart switches, which I already have and have installed. There's a couple places in my house where I have like a, it would

be a great place to have a keypad and I don't have anything yet. It's kind of like I wired it kind of ready for the future. But this, this, this product seems like it fit right in there and it's kind of like in the center of the house and it seems, it seems really cool. It seems really just a really well thought out and well-designed product. And also it's already gotten a stamp of approval from the, uh, from the, uh, the, the, the aesthetics committee here. So, uh, I'm pretty, pretty excited to hear that. So with that, um, we'll call it another week and we'll talk to you guys next week. Have a good one.