HomeTech.fm - Episode 365 - Ringing on the Edge

Episode Date: October 9, 2021

This week on HomeTech: Summer is in the air and while there’s not much going in the home tech space Amazon has decided to help fill that void. New products and services, a drone, a robot dog, Home Depot, and more… All this and, of course, a pic of the week!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, October 8th, 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. And I got about two weeks of technology and home automation to kind of cover here. I've been slacking, I guess. I don't know. There's been a major change to our daycare schedule, if you will. And yeah, I haven't adjusted to that schedule. So until I can, or until I can find a way around it, my sit down and actually read the news and everything has kind of gotten lax, I guess. And not it's not a good time for that either, because it's like this time of year, there's

absolutely nothing going on. Nothing. I can't express that more. We had a big Amazon event, which is going to kind of go over everything that they went over in the last couple of weeks and a couple of other headlines that have floated through. But really, all in all, not much is going on in the industry right now. Um, I suspect a lot of that is of course that it's summer right now. Uh, but I think even more of that is, is that there's supply chain issues going on and, uh, industry wide, even inside and outside of the industry. And it's just

almost impossible to get any kind of product, uh, that you absolutely have to have a need. Like you can't, like if you can get it, you buy it now. Um, you don't wait, uh, that you absolutely have to have a need. Like you can't, like if you can get it, you buy it now. Um, you don't wait, uh, you don't wait to put that purchase in, or you don't wait for the purchase order in because it's just, it's just not good. Uh, right now there there's, there's no guarantee that that product is going to be there on the shelf, ready to go. Um, later on, I'm speaking specifically to amps, wireless access points. Um, everything's just kind of strained right now. And, um, yeah, it's kind of tough to amps, wireless access points. Um, everything's just kind of strained right now. And, um, yeah, it's kind of tough to get, get things, uh, that, that you need, uh, at least

on the custom install side, I know that appliances are still having the same kind of like white goods, stoves, refrigerators, that kind of thing. People who are ordering those in are having the same kind of problems as well. Uh, but yeah, it's just kind of a weird time. I, I hear, unfortunately I hear that this is going to be getting worse. Uh, we're starting to see that kind of tighten up as well. I had a heck, I have a vendor that we use Yamaha for, um, some very fancy mixers that we like professional grade mixers that we use for installed sound. And, um, they, they have like 5% of their inventory in. It's really bad. But Yamaha specifically has been affected by more than just the pandemic. They were kind of a big

part of, I guess they got a lot of the DSPs from the fire there. So not only were they constrained on supply before all the supply chain stuff got messed up, they're even worse now. So we got to notice that they were going to get pushed back to January. It was in October. We were hoping to get some product in. Now we're looking at 2022 before we see anything from them. So, oh man, hopefully all this gets worked out and we have a good 2022, but it is not shaping up to be a great year this year, at least as far as product goes, um, and, and getting, getting the product that you need and, and, and into your hands and installed into a house or

installed into your own house. Uh, it's, it's not been a fun year for that. Um, uh, I'm not doing the live thing tonight. I, I'm kind of skipping out on that too. I kind of had everything lined up, ready to go for that, but, uh, it takes a lot to get the visual aspects of that put together. And it's 11 o'clock on Friday. I want to get this edited. I want to get this out. I want to get it, you know, in the can, edited and out. And I'm going to do that. Just switch back to podcast for the night. Make it low. Make it easy on me and see what I can get going for you guys every week. So with that said, why don't we jump into the home tech headlines? In security news, nearly a dozen widely used

Netgear Wi-Fi router models have a serious security flaw and need to be patched. The security flaw centers around exploiting an insecure remote update process used by the Circle Parental Control Service. And while the feature may be turned off, if you've got one of these, the update process is actually left on by default.

And that update process, unfortunately, uses insecure HTTP to download firmware, which, you know, if you kind of, in theory, could be used to allow to put some ones in the middle, like a bad guy, a bad faith actor could get in the middle, and they can execute an attack on the router that completely take over the firmware. The effective models are the R6400, 6700. You know what? I'm going to put a link to this on the website. There's a ton of them. Most of them look like the like the Nighthawk. They kind of fall under that brand. If I say that and you've seen that line of product, you kind of know exactly what it looks like. It looks like a futuristic, I don't know, spaceship or something. Like if you have one of those routers, uh, firmware updates are available now, go out and get them, go get it. It's time. Uh, you, you, you don't need to, uh, to risk having, you know, any security issue on your router that can

be exploited, uh, over the last couple of weeks. I mean, major, major news, uh, for some of the like denial of service attacks, the DDoS attacks, I guess it's kind of still out there, still floating out there. And what they're using now are routers. Specifically, there's a huge botnet set up with microtic routers. And those are being used to actually, they're not even doing anything right now.

They're just kind of testing. And the tests are 20, 30 times fold larger than anything we've ever seen before. It's probably even bigger now. Like they've just been testing the botnet that they've assembled. And, you know, when they pointed at an unsuspecting victim, there's just nothing that's going to stop something like that's been happening. So those botnets are real. They're out there. They're caused by these insecure products that have security flaw in them that get updated and don't get updated and they get taken over. So make sure if you do have, I mean, everybody has a router. If you can get into it and check for firmware updates, make sure you're updated because

there's stuff that comes out almost every week on this stuff. This Nighthawk one is a pretty popular line and I've seen it. I think even my in-laws have it. So make sure that you have that product, get it updated. Dave Zantz dug up a few new Wyze products that may be on the way, now that Wyze has taken on some new funding. A new less frumpy, that's Dave's words,

doorbell is on the way, and a new smart light switch with a touchable surface. So it's kind of like a, looks like a capacitive touch decor switch. Other possible products include a new Wyze lockbox or gun safe. I don't know about that. It has a fingerprint reader on it. It's kind of cool, I guess, in that respect. And a Wyze scale, a new Wyze scale. They've already had one of those out. Again, Wyze, we'll have to wait and see what does come out from that company, but they do dabble in all sorts of products. So we'll have to check out when those are released,

what they look like, and how much they are. Facebook, you know that website that went down earlier this week, announced two new Portal displays in the past few weeks. An updated Portal Plus for $349 and a new $199 Portal Go that is also the company's first portal, like on the go, portable smart display. As the name says, the Go can be taken off the charging station and moved around for about 14 hours, according to Facebook. It's like five hours of conferencing, like using the video display and everything, but 14 hours of basically listening to music. Um, to date, I've only met a few people, one, one person, one person on Twitter, uh, who claims they have used this for, for basically

conferencing for their work. Um, and I do know that these were pretty popular in video conferencing, especially during the pandemic. Uh, it's a good little system. It's got a great camera on it. You can load. Last year, they updated support for Zoom, WebEx, BlueJeans, GoToMeeting, I think. So that was a really good, really good, like all in one. Like all you have to do is drop this off, get it connected to Wi-Fi. You don't even have to log in through Facebook on the thing. Like you can just run the Zoom app and get on and run your Zoom meetings there. But like it was a good, low friction technology that has good sound and video in it for those kind of virtual meetings.

So Facebook also says in December that they'll be adding support for Microsoft Teams. So it may have found a niche there. I still I'm still curious who's using those things because I have not ever seen one in the wild. Well, moving on here. The news is finally out. Nice, a global manufacturer of smart home security and building automation products based over in Italy has acquired Nortec Control from Melrose Industries.

Nortec Control is the parent company of 2GIG, Elan, Linear, Mighty mule for proficient, uh, speaker crafts. Both of those last two were speakers and audio companies, Geffen, Zantac, Panamax, Furman, Numera, and Intellivision. And with this acquisition, nice expands its portfolio to provide a full suite of integrated solutions for residential, commercial, industrial, and government customers from consumer DIY to custom and professionally installed products

and high-security applications. Yeah, and they've also kind of beefed up their presence here in North America. I've run across Nice a few times. I remember them being the parent company of Abode or acquiring or investing in Abode early on. So I kind of think I ran across them there, but I also think I've run across a few of their products, like over in European markets, but not much of a presence here in North America. Now they do. It's interesting to see this deal and $285 million transaction. It's quite a bit, and it's actually said to be Nice's largest investment to date for the company.

I did see a news article that said that they said nothing's really going to change with these companies for the next couple of years. They're just going to let everything run its course. And later, probably 2023, is probably the first time time they're gonna start working on bringing the you know the two companies together and integrating things a little bit more so it's gonna be a little while before that kind of uh what's gonna be a while before something you know we see whatever plays out with that i i keep seeing these mergers and acquisitions in our industry and um you know it's it says that there's some there's some maturity there, right? Like that's that's it's a mature market. That means that these companies are going to be

buying each other for these prices, yada, yada, yada. But what it also says is there's some like shrinking in the market, like some contraction here. And I think that's something we all need to kind of keep an eye on, at least in the custom space. Obviously, we're going to talk about Amazon later. A lot of that middle market and low end market that we were serving as custom integrators has been brought into the DIY world. And the needs are being met there. They're being met and improved upon at a rate that custom product really can't compete with. So I've noticed a you know, I've seen, I've noticed a lot of our, our, our projects and our price points that we've seen are kind of moving up the scale. And we're seeing that contraction happen. There's still the DIY do it for me crowd out there. And

it's a massive, massive market to get involved with. So you can still get out there and install Amazon products, ring, you know, ring blink lights, that kind of thing in someone's home and make, you know, a living doing that kind of thing. I'm mounting TVs and that, that kind of thing. But the custom integrator, the mid market of that, you know, anything that, you know, typically would have been in the past, maybe five, 10, 15,000, 30,000, $40,000 worth of work. That's that kind of project is slowly kind of like disappearing and it's not that it's not that that we don't have like product as custom mitigators to put in into that kind of that price but i'm just noticing that those kind of uh

projects are being scaled back or you're seeing kind of the opposite where they're just getting pushed up and getting bigger. And I noticed that we're seeing more high-end projects moving forward, like kind of seeing some of those bids going out or dealers contacting us, looking for large network systems rather than just a couple access points here and there. Kind of seeing that more often now. And whereas in the past couple of years, you know, few and far between. So it will be interesting to kind of keep an eye on the custom integration market as we kind of move through this phase, I guess. Like all the distributors have kind of like, well, there was one distributor that snapped up everybody and snapped up a number of like control four as well. So it

will be interesting to see what this means for our industry moving forward. And it's going to take a couple of years for this kind of flesh out completely. But, you know, I have noticed that basic projects, you know, basic, the basic install stuff can, can definitely be picked up and you can definitely go out and get like a do it for me type install, uh, put together at a reasonable price point. And, uh, you know, these, these projects have definitely come down in scale and scope, um, simply because the needs are being met from kind of the basic, you know, run of the mill, buy it off the shelf product, uh, which, which is interesting. So if you have any ideas, you have any thoughts on that, let me know. Feedback at hometech.fm.

You can reach over to me at the Hub and talk to me there about it. I think we probably need to talk about this a little bit more moving forward and see what the industry has begun to look like or started to look like as we move forward. Well, that said, let's go ahead and talk about the Amazon, the big event that they had, I think, last week. Big home, kind of home product event that they announced a number of new products for the home,

and they had a wellness product in there as well. They had a fitness tracker. I think it's just an update to one they had before. I'm not going to go into that, but the first thing they kind of talked about out of the gate was a smart thermostat. Kind of interesting. Not only just a, you know, kind of basic Alexa-controlled smart thermostat,

but it's a $60 Alexa-controlled thermostat. So not really much to say about it because it's, you know, what do you expect from a smart thermostat? It can turn on and turn off when it needs to. You can set up schedules and you can control it with Alexa. I think that ticks off pretty much all the boxes the thermostat needs to have ticked off. What's interesting here is that this is kind of being brought into the Amazon ecosystem, right? So not only will you be able to tick off those boxes, but like you, you can, you can use Alexa to do run like their, um, like their deeper integrations with their, uh, I forget what they call it, intense or intentions or something like that. Uh, where

the Alexa system kind of kind of like figures out that you, um, Oh, you're leaving the house. So you probably want to have, uh, the AC turned up and that kind of thing. So, um, there's a lot of like smart things you can do with a $60 thermostat. And I noticed on there that Amazon said that they partnered with Honeywell to on the hardware. And because of the, some of the rebates that come from energy companies, the price could be as low as $10 for some customers. So you can pre-order those now and they ship in November 4th. It should be pretty interesting to see where they go with that. Next up was the Amazon Echo Show 15. It's not 15 as in like the version 15, I guess,

but it's a 15.6 inch HD display. It can be mounted on walls, cabinets, or placed on the counter, either horizontally or vertically. And the display lets users set up a customizable home screen that features Alexa specific apps and allow the user to control home devices, track packages, leave notes

for other people in the house, like kind of a electronic smart bulletin board, if you will. You can also watch streaming video on it. So it's kind of like the TV in the kitchen, but a smart TV in the kitchen that you can kind of interact with. It's got a lot of, a lot of, a lot of neat things. It's only like $249. So it's not really, not really a bad price. It's actually a pretty good bargain. Um, and unlike I, in my opinion here, previous Amazon products, it actually kind of looks good. So I, I, I mean, look out Samsung. It does look like a picture frame. Um, I, I haven't seen one of these in person, but it doesn't look bad. And, uh, from everything they have on there, um, like it,

it looks like it could be, this product has been tried and tried and tried in the past before. So I'm kind of like hesitant to say this is going to be a success, but Amazon has enough integrations in with their product. I think this could be a swing and they could, they could actually hit it, you know, out of the park with, with what they want to do. I was actually looking at this. I'm thinking I could put one up in my garage and have like a little bulletin board with a calendar, a family calendar on it, but I'm not really invested too much in the Amazon ecosystem. So I don't really fully know or want to integrate all my calendars and everything into Amazon, much less have, you know, this thing hanging on the

wall over there. You know, it does have a camera on it so it can actually recognize who's walking up to it and show that person the on, on the bulletin board or messages to them or calendar appointments, that kind of thing. Um, so pretty smart device. Looks good. Just, I don't know if that one's for me. Not sure if that one's for me. Um, also kind of like towards a privacy play, all the Amazon also said the voice interactions with Echo show 10 devices and newer will be processed locally instead of up in the cloud. So it seems like a privacy play there. But of course, I think the biggest thing for home tech enthusiasts is going to be the increase in speed that the end user experience is going to get out of that.

Like it's going to be a performance gain, a huge performance gain. So I kind of I'm going to link to the video and during this, during this, um, section of the show, there, there were a number of good ideas and services that kind of announced and kind of, I just recommend watching that part because the ideas and the foundation they're laying are actually pretty good. Um, for example, you can now teach Alexa what certain sounds are. So one of the examples they use, it's like having Alexa learn the sound of the beep noise your refrigerator makes when you leave the door open too long, right? If it hears

that sound, it can send you a notification saying, hey, you forgot to close the door. I can see that being useful in the laundry room when the dryer goes off and I inevitably forget, you know, the washer goes off, sorry. And I forget that in there for like what, two or three days and there's wet laundry in there smelling. So that's pretty simple to do compared to the other things that they're doing in these little devices and probably something I think that's going to be fairly reliable for them to reproduce and do. And honestly, that's the kind of idea I'd expect to come from Apple, but Amazon is beating them well to the punch on that. These are the kind of features that I think once you get set up and they're easy to set up and use, it's going to bring joy to somebody for using that kind of automation in their house. So we'd love to see more technology

companies doing little things like that to improve their products. And hopefully we'll get there. Third up, we have the Amazon Glow, which is not really a home tech piece, but I thought it was a really neat piece of technology designed for the kids. This is a product I don't think that would have made much sense pre-pandemic, but maybe they had this kind of like sitting on the back burner on the sidelines and definitely moved it forward because of all the lockdown measures and that have been in place around the world. Uh, the glow is a $249 tabletop eight inch touchscreen, if you will. Uh, it's got a front facing camera on it, so you can use it for video calls and conferencing. And you can see where, you know, that kind of brings you, you could bring in and talk to somebody. And it's a pretty simple device. It's basically the Facebook portal, right?

You've made, congratulations, Amazon, you've made, the glow is actually the portal. But what makes this one stand out to me is it actually has this little interactive projector that can display a 19 inch like display on the surface right below the glow, if you will. And that can be interacted with, like you can play like little games and everything and a little kid can like draw just kind of moving their hand over what is being projected down on onto that mat. Let me read a little quote from them. Glow uniquely fuses projection, video, and sensing technologies to create a virtual experience that feels like being together in person,

no matter how far away you are. There's some interactivity to that where someone could be coloring or something, and it shows up on the other side as well, and kids can interact together and that kind of thing. It comes with a full year of Amazon Kids Plus that has access to thousands of children's books and dozens of interactive games and activities for kids. Uh, it costs $250. Uh, and that kind of sounds a lot, but there's a, they're including this two year, no worry warranty with it. So if it breaks, they just, they just replace it. Um, I guess their play there is that you'll continue with that,

uh, kids Plus thing. So you can sign up. This is one of those products you can sign up for an invite to actually purchase. So a neat product. I do like and am jealous. I wish I had some kind of little 19-inch interactive projector thing on my desk. But if it's got to go to the kids, it's got to go to the kids. Let them play with it for a little while. Next up in the presentation was Ring. And we've all been wondering a while for that Ring drone was when now we know. And

after teasing the product last year, you can now sign up for one of these invite test only things where you can test out the ring. Always home cam. It's designed to fly around on a pre-programmed flight path. And when it's activated, it goes around your home and kind of can check, see if you left the door open or, or something along those lines.

I'm not really sure. I will be interesting to see when these things get out, out into the wild, what people actually use for them. If you, if you want to help test the device, you can pony up $250 and sign up on the Amazon page for the privilege. It should be an interesting thing for Ring to test and navigate through people's homes and fly around.

But I think some of the bigger news from Ring that kind of gets lost along the way is Eero routers. They have embedded, this is kind of Amazon kind of flexing the partnerships and products that they have acquired over the years. So Eero routers are now going to be built into the new Ring Alarm Pro. And this is a new, completely new alarm system that they're coming out with. It's got a bunch of little battery backup packs that you can put on it to keep everything working for like up to 24 hours, they said. The base can also be kind of like put together as the hub for Ring's camera. So they've got some new processor on the base where all the camera video processing can actually happen locally.

So including the new vision based alerts and everything, all that can happen locally. And they're calling that technology RingEdge. I think this is a pretty big deal. RingEdge also enables the local storage of video through like a SD card, micro SD card, you can plug into it. So as long as you have one of those in there, you can record the video locally when events happen. These new features, these two new features require a $20 a month subscription to Ring Protect Pro, which is a, you know, their subscription service, kind of like their alarm service, I suppose. So you won't be able to bypass the monthly camera fees, but it might help those who have bandwidth issues to have this available,

where they want to put up some inexpensive cameras, this inexpensive alarm system, and maybe say you got some bandwidth caps or something like that, $20 a month, you get an alarm system monitored, the data gets stored locally, and you're not uploading videos every time somebody walks by the front door. So it's not a bad deal there. The clips that are stored locally will not be stored in the cloud, but you can still get to them through the ring app. The local store is kind of a big miss, I think here, but the local storage does not unlock 24 seven video recording. So I really wish they had thought that through or given you the ability to put a larger, you know, micro SDs have, what do they

get up to? Like maybe 512 megabytes or something. It's not very, what am I saying? They probably get pretty big now, but why not be able to hook up in like a, a USB-C hard drive or something like that? It'd be much more nicer than, than, you know, dealing with like micro, micro SD cards and that kind of thing. And you can get all the storage you want on it and record 24-7. Kind of going along with the battery backup, it brings also including LTE backup. So if the Wi-Fi network goes down, you lose internet connection, the LTE network, the cellular network, will be used as a backup.

And there's some data limits, I think three gigabytes a month or something like that. But there's a nominal fee that you could pay to have more data going back and forth on that. So it's not a terrible thing. I think for initial price for the alarm of like $250, the monitoring cost of 20 bucks a month, it's professional monitoring. Like they're actually kind of taking on ADT and that kind of thing at this point. You get the digital security, internet backup stuff. There's a lot going on here. A lot of value, I think, being put into this product.

Still, I think very hard to beat for the right person. It's not for everybody, right? It's not like some people are going to want or need a professionally installed alarm system. We know, at least I know from my journeys through installing those, that's really not that many people here in the States. I think the number has always been around 20% of people out there actually bothered having an alarm system in their house. You know, and I think this could be kind of an additive, you know, to capture some of that,

you know, 80 or 80% that's not using those professionally installed alarm systems. And like I said, it's a pretty good value. I think there's a lot going on. They've got a lot going on with this particular product, and I'll be interested to see what the adoption is for this in the future. We can also partner it up with Home Depot for a cellular version for construction job site security. It's not a bad idea either. I've had a number of projects back in my integration days where we were required to have job site security installed for insurance purposes. They didn't want someone breaking into the house and making off with, you know, parts and product that were being installed into some of these high end homes. Um, that was challenging actually worth traditional security systems. Um, but ring is kind of making this easy. Now you can, you could pop one of these

things in, put a couple of motion detectors up and come in these bright orange Home Depot colors and just kind of have it in there, even on battery backup with LTE. Like it's still a pretty good bargain, I think. So they also announced the virtual security guard, which is basically professional video monitoring. So video event happens, it gets uploaded, some live person at rapid response is who they're partnering with, will actually look at that video, determine if it's something going on that shouldn't be going on, they will notify you or dispatch the police. It's kind of a normal thing that you see have that's built into other security, like professional security systems for a while now. But their ring is actually offering this too and they said they're going to they're working with rapid response more monitoring companies will be coming to that later but it's right now it's

going to cost $99 per month per location so that's kind of a bit more I, you actually get a virtual security guard, you know, to, to, to watch and, and see what's going on at the location. So yeah, I could see that costing a little bit more blink. It's also an Amazon company. I forget that they bought blink cause it kind of pay attention to ring and what they're doing a little bit more and, and the blink like yard lights. And some of the blink lights actually got brought over to ring and they're branded ring lights like but they're not they're not the same they're not the same i i don't know it's it's a very confusing thing it was kind of weird watching jamie simenoff the founder of doorbot and and what is now ring and now owned by amazon announcing a video doorbell

under the blink brand but he did it uh the bl's new doorbell will start at $49. It's pretty bare bones. It's available for pre-order now. It has 1080p video, wired or battery operation, and the option to store video locally on a USB thumb drive connected to a sync module too. So you don't need to pay for cloud storage in this case. A company claims that two AA batteries keeps the doorbell working for up to two years with a wired connection. But I suspect those two AA batteries probably won't last as long without that wired power hooked up to it. It's kind of a weird statement to make, but there you go. Two years with power, with it being plugged in, it'll work for two years. Okay. Blink also is adding a Blink floodlight camera mount that pairs up with the existing Blink outdoor camera to add 700 lumens of LED light for $40. So not a bad thing there.

Something I missed in all this was this idea of ring custom alerts. And it was kind of like a, a, just a kind of brief point in the presentation kind of skipped over, but it it's one of these things kind of like those custom sound alerts that I talked about earlier, where you could train it to learn the refrigerator beep or anything like that, but for video, right. Um, and they, they breezed right over this. I tried to find more about it, but there's really not much out there. There's nothing in my Ring app that indicates that this has been released,

but they said in the presentation that it's been released. So what they talked about in here was that you could train Ring cameras to identify if a car is being parked in your driveway and trigger a specific alert when that car's there or, you know, whatever. Like if the car leaves, trigger alert saying that it left. And okay, that sounds really useful. You could have a Ring camera that looks at a garage door and you can determine if that garage door is opened or closed based on that video. So this really cool feature, completely missed over. I did find a CNET article article that said Ring will offer customer alerts only with the Ring Spotlight Cam battery.

Okay. To start with. Okay. And the Ring didn't say it intends to keep it exclusive to that camera in the long term. So you'll be able to take five pictures of each object state you'd like registered. So back to that garage example, garage door open, garage door closed, and you teach the camera how to determine the difference between those two states. Then the camera will send you alerts depending on your preferences. So you can say if the garage door is open, send me, hey, you left the garage door open after 45 minutes or something. I had to look into this more. It really seems like this is probably like one of those hidden features that they really should have plugged on harder. But if it's only

on one camera, not on everything that they're offering, I guess I can understand why they didn't talk about it too much more. But this really sounds cool. And I'm really hoping to learn a little bit more about this as we move forward. So anyway, on to the robot. Yes, yes. Amazon announced and it is kind of made all the headlines, a thousand dollar robot dog thing. The Amazon Astro is a two wheeled robot with a rectangular screen thing on the front of it that that features orbs like it has a little face on it, kind of to make it more human-friendly, I guess. It can follow you around the home like an Alexa on wheels, essentially. It's funny.

I remember, I'm pretty sure I talked about it on the podcast here a couple months back, some people who had made an Alexa, and they put it on wheels, and it did follow them around. They said it was a great little product. So maybe Amazon looked at that and said, yeah, we can do that, but better. This device can map out your floor plan. It can be sent to investigate what's going on in a specific room. It's got a little telescoping camera on it.

So this camera like pops out of the top and kind of can go up. Yeah, it looked like it was about 30 inches or so to kind of see if there was something left on the countertop or maybe a door was unlocked or the example they gave in the video is they've left the stove on. I don't know. It looks it looks kind of interesting. It has facial recognition built into it so it can can actually deliver items. There's a little cargo bay or something in it that it can drive and deliver an item to a specific person in the house. I don't really know that that's a problem that people have, but Amazon's trying to solve it. It can play music, deliver weather, pretty much video calls. It can do anything that, you know, an Amazon Echo can do. And it can be, it can be integrated with

Ring Protect Pro that we talked about earlier and kind of uses a home sentry security device that wheels around rather than flying. So if the flying thing freaks out the pet, maybe this thing won't. I don't know. I don't know. This is a ambitious project. And there's there's there's there's already been a few people come out and said, you know, this doesn't work like they advertise it or, you know, it's really dumb. It falls downstairs. Stairs can disable it. And I'm kind of I'm kind of willing to give it a benefit of that. It's it's a Gen 1 product, clearly in beta from, you know, from from what they showed and kind of what you, what they're doing. You know,

this is one of those products that you can beta test for them for a thousand dollars of your money. But, you know, what if they become, what if something in this becomes a home run like Echo devices were, right? So we saw those horrible videos and thought, Echo, what a dumb idea. This guy's asking for dad jokes or trivia with the family. That's okay. You know, it's corny, but I'll get it. If Amazon gets like something right or this whole thing right or even 10% of it right, it could be on something even bigger. And we've seen that with the Echo. They tried something and it latched, then latched onto what the customers found useful. Like I remember those, those initial ads for the Echo and, you know, the dad bringing this silly thing home and asking it jokes and doing weather updates. And it was just like,

what are they thinking? But people tried it and people found it useful for timer, kitchen timers. I mean, this huge thing for kitchen timers, who, who knew how badly we needed kitchen timers, right? People used it for home automation and it became kind of like a huge brand in home automation overnight. Like that people forget that is not what the Echo was, was, was handed to us for. Like they, the Amazon didn't really have that kind of sitting in the forefront. They, they, they really didn't. And it's what we consumers, we latched onto and gave Amazon feedback and said, we really like to, we really enjoy controlling all this home products.

And so they started iterating on the product and this product, this kind of product, like the, the thousand dollar robot dog might not work on day one, but if iterating on the product. And this product, this kind of product, like the $1,000 robot dog, might not work on day one. But if they iterate on the good ideas that they have, they really could be onto something here. For now, it's that $1,000 invite-only product that you can have the privilege of testing. But I think I'll wait on this. I'm not going to buy it, obviously. But I think I'll wait on the sidelines and see if there's a few any ideas that come out of this and give them a chance. Give Amazon a chance to kind of test these things out and see what works.

And we may not end up with robot dogs. Right. But we may end up with something else that comes out of this product that, you know, we all really like and enjoy. But if we do get robot dogs, I think it's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Like, you know, I wish it looked a little bit different. I wish it looked like the Sony. What is it? The Sony Asimo or whatever that was. I don't know.

A little Sony dog that probably costs about the same amount, but it was like a little puppy you could play with. And it would kind of hobble around and you can roll a ball to it and it would roll the ball back. It was cute. I wish it was like that, but you know, we can get a, basically an Alexa, you know, sorry, an echo strapped to a Roomba is what we're going to get out of this. And yeah, we'll see what, where it goes. I'm happy to, to see somebody experimenting and taking an initiative on, on a different type of product. All the links and topics discussed tonight can be

found at the show notes over at hometech.fm slash 365. And that link is hometech.fm slash 365. And pick of the week. I have a funny one here speaking of Roombas and robots. This one is a good one. This is from Nathan B. Lawrence at Nathan B. Lawrence on Twitter. He says, I am a connoisseur of weird robot vacuum issues because they all seem to get at least one thing slightly wrong. But this might be my favorite. He says, I discover this happening almost every morning. And this is a glorious picture. You have to go click on the show notes and click the link to follow over to Nathan's page over there. What this is, is it's one of these robot vacuums. It's kind of like a little on-off toggle switch on the side to turn it on and on and off to stop it from working, I guess.

And as it's doing its job vacuuming up, it got a little bit too close to one of those doorstops that's in the floor baseboard. And the doorstop is actually at the exact same level as that on-off switch. And it turns off the robot. What a weird edge case that I don't think anybody designing a robot vacuum would ever think of. But what an amazing testament to, you know, if you're worried about the robots taking over, you know, I don't know. I don't know how much you have to worry about them if it's taken out by a doorstop. So funny picture. Go check that out. HomeTech.fm slash 365. If you have any feedback, questions uh questions comments picks of the week or great ideas for a

show give us a shout email address is feedback at home tech.fm or visit home tech.fm slash feedback and you can fill out the online form i do want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show but especially those who are able to financially support the show through the patreon page if you don't know about the patreon page head on over to home tech.fm support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show,

but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub, where you and everyone else can gather every day to kind of make fun of robots. That's what we do there. There's a couple of good conversation. Robert Spivak has been been posting in the hub and he posts these really good long posts and then walks away like it's a mic drop. And so

I have to ask him to come back, come back and follow up on those conversations because they're actually pretty good. But yeah, always a good conversation to be had in there. Questions, if you have a question, it links you right into tons of experts who can point you in the right direction or talk you down off the ledge. So it's a really good place to be. If you want to help out the show but can't support financially, totally understand that.

Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or a positive rating in the podcast app of your choice. And that wraps up another couple weeks of technology choice. And that wraps up another couple of weeks of technology news. Yeah, I have I will try to at least commit to getting in and doing a little show a little bit earlier in the week. I think that's my problem right now. Waiting till Wednesday or Thursday or even Friday like tonight and doing a show at last minute. Not really happening. So I'm going to I'm trying to like bump the schedule back earlier in the week and see if there's a way i can do that and at least get the show out at least more consistently i'm sorry about being inconsistent there but i do do appreciate you listening i do

appreciate appreciate everybody supporting the show um the way they do uh summer the summer is always tough to get through because you know the travel plans there's all sorts of stuff going on but also there's not much news to talk about. We don't have new products anymore. We all have to wait until, at least for the pro side, you have to wait towards the end of the year or beginning of the year when we have ISE or CES for the DIY side. So hopefully we'll start to see some more news trickle out of the industry.

And as we move into the holidays, I'm sure we're going to have some cool deals that pop up here and there that we can kind of talk about. But a long way of saying thanks for listening to the show. Totally appreciate that. Thanks for supporting the show. And everybody have a great weekend and I will see you next week.