HomeTech.fm - Episode 433 - Silver Alert

Episode Date: May 3, 2023

On this week's HomeTech: Zooz has a new sensor made for smoke detectors, Ring announces an indoor camera with a privacy shutter, Alarm.com gets smarter with AI, Netflix loses 1 Million customers in Spain, Wiz and Nest really Matter, and Home Assistant is getting serious about voice control. All of this, a pick of the week, project updates, and more!

This is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, April 28th. From Sarasota, Florida, I'm Seth Johnson. From Lewis Center, Ohio, I'm TJ Huddleston. And from Bickering, Ontario, I'm Gavin Cavill. And welcome to the Home Tech Podcast, a podcast where every week we sit down and talk about all the fun things that are going on in the world of home automation, news, and all that good stuff. And I got to sit down late tonight because there was a nice helicopter

flying over my house earlier that just completely ruined trying to record. I don't know what they were doing out there. And it was funny. I was looking. My wife came in. She's like, the cops are outside just driving around crazy. So I don't know. You know, back in the day when I saw that happening, I used to jump on

Twitter and I'd search and I'd find some news about what's going on in the neighborhood. Nowadays, though, if I jump on Twitter, I get like so many more ads and all these other posts. I can't search for anything on Twitter anymore. So I just gave up with it. I used to think something important was happening, but it turns out I live in Florida and it's like a retirement state, you know, and they use those fancy helicopters to track down old people that wandered off. There's silver alert time. Yeah, silver alert. Exactly.

So that's pretty much probably what happened. Like you would think that there's a major crime event or a giant wreck or the bank robbers are hiding out in the house. No, it's most likely that grandpa wandered off and they're trying to find him i first thought of clippy you know what on a killing spree or something like that you know that was the first thing on my mind it's funny you say that because when i told you guys uh you know something's going on i poked my head i just poked my head out the door and that helicopter is just hovering right there over my house and clippy was right there in the front yard, like going through. So I ran back out to take a picture of like that Clippy and then the helicopter

hovering and watching, but he had already skirted around the side of the house. So it was too slow, I guess. Won't be long before Clippy is causing mayhem in the neighborhood. I remember the first time my mom came to visit on Florida and we were driving on the highway and I saw one of those silver alert signs that, you know, flash up on the, on the highway, like several times a day. And I was like, Oh no, they thought they think you're missing. She hit me pretty hard. That was worth it. You know, Definitely worth it. Yeah. It's not, it's anytime you're on the highway.

Now I have not been on the highway at all and not seen that sign, silver alert. Okay, hold on a minute. I'm not from Florida. I've been there only a couple times, but is silver alert a real thing? Oh, 100% a real thing, and it's for missing old people. I learned something new today. There's the amber alert for the missing kids, but they have to have a different color.

And of course they're going to pick silver. Yeah. It's for the old people. Wow. Okay. Then I learned something new today. There's always a sign on the highway. Look for silver alert,

Toyota Corolla. Here's the license plate tags. You know, it's like, okay, like, I guess I'll look for that Toyota Corolla. Wow.

There's a million of them out here. I wonder which one they are. Exactly. Exactly. The one that's drivingolla wow there's a million of them out here i wonder which one they are exactly exactly the one that's driving slow on the highway all of them yeah it's always like the quintessential like old people car too it's like a buick random or buick encore or whatever they are and it's like well that's like every old person you're not really giving me anything here yeah yeah it's good luck it's a needle in a haystack for you guys it's not like a blue corvette or something you know we just upset all our silver listeners right now right if you're a silver listener that's all right if you're yes we got a new patron goal here for you hopefully hopefully none of those ones are missing you could be old and not missing what if they were just trying to escape

we keep finding them and bringing them back it's like it's like a tortoise when they're crossing the road you're supposed to like carry them to the opposite side but some people don't do that so i did that with a snail oh man well uh silver silver alerts aside we actually we sat down earlier this week to record the show and there was no no news at all but luckily a few few new products have come out and um some news has hit the wire i guess we can talk about this week so uh what do you say we jump into these hometech headlines let's do it let's do it all right uh first up a new zoos signal sensor and this is kind of uh gavin you and i were talking about this before

the show this is one of those like problem solver type products and and i guess there is the zoos 800 series z-wave long range dc signal sensor and that is a mouthful of a product. But what it looks like they intend maybe you to do with this is to hook it up to like a smoke alarm. So, you know, or a COO detector or something that has like a DC output on it. And it'll sense that and then send you alert. Is that what they're trying to do here? Well, the device in general, it allows you to hook it up to something with some kind of trigger wire. Well, you know, if something happens, it's a little low voltage and you can now act on that, you know, tied into your home setup. Right. The example they gave here was basically a smoke alarm.

So if you have the hardwired smoke alarms, they have that one trigger wire, you know in between all of them so if one gets triggered they all get triggered well you can tie this into that and it just monitors the voltage on that line and when it gets triggered then you can have it automate something like turn on an alarm or you know whatever you want to do right so it's kind of um i consider this one of those innovative products you know something different um and as a problem solver. So if you're looking to smartify your smoke detectors, this is a good way of doing it, you know, getting that signal into your home assistant or your habitat, you know, so you can act on it and you can do things like turn on the lights or unlock doors, make it easier

to exit at the smoke alarm. And you can also wire it up so it monitors smoke and co2 right but that's just one example there's other examples you can use out there i was talking telling you earlier something with the furnace and trigger you can use it to trigger a fan when the furnace kicks in by monitoring the signal along a certain wire right that's a little more advanced because you'd have to know where to hook it up but it could be used for something like that so i think it's really cool something different it's only 24 us um so that's priced well as well yeah yeah and i'm looking at it uh so i was hoping that they would have the ability to like it's got a dc sensor on it right for that that signal level that comes in but it looks like this is actually a it's a it's 100 to 240 volt

power input to power it up so it's not a low voltage device at all you're gonna have to you know turn off the electrical wire hardware that's in just like any light switch yeah interesting well on the smoke detectors when they're hardwired they'll have 120 volt there right yeah so this will just it allows you to tap into those easily and then you you use their signal wire yeah it's a genius idea and you know it doesn't look like it's that big of a device either so you should be able to tuck it in a wall or somewhere like that or a ceiling so good idea we we used to have something similar to this back in the security days that does exist out there and i i just i couldn't tell you what it was, but it was like the same idea.

You'd hook this little device up at the end of the smoke detector run and you'd have a low voltage security, like basically contact sensor on there. And if the smoke alarms are going off in the house, that could be your fire signal for your security system or whatever. It's one of those things that like,

you probably don't want to do because like the smoke alarms that go off in the house go off all the time and they're not very good. Um, so, so, uh, it was always like the, the security ones seem to be a little bit like the, the ones that get installed in the house are like, I would always get calls from people and they're like, why is the smoke detector talking to me in the middle of the night? Telling me they have talking voices on these smoke detectors now? Like they'll talk to you. Like, I don't know. We didn't install anything that talks to you. Like, why are you calling me?

So, you know, come to find out it's always the smoke detectors that the electrician put in and they always fall to go out and the batteries run down. You hear that beep, that chirpy beep in the background of people's homes and that kind of thing. I don't know. I really wish that you could do, I guess here in Florida, you can't do, you have to have the hardwired one 20 volt smoke detector.

You can't just put in low voltage smoke detectors for whatever reason. So I wish, I wish we could do that here. That would be a nicer install for most people because in the houses I all did, like we'd put two smoke detectors in. One would be the high voltage for code, one would be for the low voltage for the alarm system.

And yeah, it looks ugly. Yeah, that's why I like those little firefighter devices that just listen for the signal. Yeah, because they're not installing another smoke detector for somebody to worry about and it just listens for everything so doesn't stop the talking smoke smoke alarm problem it does not only way you can do that is with a hammer that's that's actually the solution what that one owner came up with so yeah anyway uh when in doubt smash it with a hammer exactly Exactly. Exactly. All right, moving on here.

Smart Home Security Company Ring is revamped its indoor camera to include a manual privacy cover that disables all audio and video recording. This is the first Ring home security camera to come with a physical shut off shutter, I guess. It's kind of it's a big giant door. It slides over the top of this thing. Previously, you had to use the app to turn off audio and video recording or unplug the camera

like a normal person would who doesn't trust this stuff or purchase a $10 privacy kit that will, I didn't even know they had this, that will cover but only disable the video, not the audio. The Ring Indoor Cam is available

for pre-orders starting today for $59 shipping in May 24th, 2023. Kind of a, I mean, I've seen these before, so it's not a novel idea, but you know, it's a smart idea from people who are concerned about security. If they want to have an indoor camera, they can have it and they don't have to go through all these crazy things like unplugging them or running them all back to one location and flipping a switch or integrating $59 cameras into a smart home system and using, you know, $59 lights, which is to turn them off. Yeah, this has got we've done some crazy things over the years, but it seems like a good idea. I think I would just get annoyed with manually having to do that like every day. I mean, because I guess if you're going to get this, wouldn't you be using it all the time?

The privacy function? Maybe. Maybe it would. I don't know. It just seems kind of weird. I would just use like a smart outlet and just be done with it myself. That's what we have with all of our cameras at the moment. What if you forget? Like you're walked out the door and you know you put the camera close to

the door so you can see who's coming in and out but you forget to flip the shutter one day and you're at work and you're like oh no can't see well i can't see what's going on i can't see the dog i can't see the amazon delivery guy oh no it's the new uh did i leave the uh hair iron plugged in that type of thing right but i also feel like they only gave you half of it they only solved half of the problem with this one you know like we can't see you but we can still hear you you know like no this shuts off both this will disable it doesn't didn't say just the audio was still there yeah i think it was just the yeah just the video it turns this this product does audio and video they have a $10 privacy kit for the other.

Yeah, the previous one did it. It's like an add-on. It basically has a toilet paper roll that you slide over the top. Just buy a $20 Matter smart plug, and there's your problem solved. There you go. Just throw more Matter at it. Because we have ours set up on a daily schedule. So during the week, ours will automatically turn on when we're gone.

And then they'll automatically turn off. And it's super easy. And if I forget or the schedule isn't running for whatever day I want them on, I just manually turn them on. You got to trust the system, though. What if you don't trust the system? Trust the system. Well, then probably shouldn't have a Ring camera in your house either way.

I trust my Z-Wave smart plugs way more than I do my internal cameras. And that's why I've never been a fan of the software power off. Several of the cameras have an option in the UI to turn them off. But that just doesn't seem right to me. I want to know that they don't have power and that they can't turn on without my approval. I think that's the best way to do it. I mean,

cause even, even like a windows computer, I know Mac has kind of taken some steps to prevent this from happening, but windows computers kind of like this notorious for people like hacking in and turning on the camera and not even turning on the little light like they don't even let you do that but there's like these these i read this really disgusting article about people who like basically stalk their victims that way and do strange things to them and just freak them out like they'll eject the cd tray on their computer or something like

that and it's pretty awful i guess there's like an entire uh culture around this i guess of 15 year old boys who get their kicks doing that i don't know yeah anyway losers i guess uh it's what what a just thing to do but like yeah it's it's like those those cameras can come on without the little light coming on and you don't know that the camera's on. If you don't trust, I mean, you can't trust your computer that costs thousands of dollars. Like why would you trust the $59 camera you just bought from ring? So I get it. I get it. All right. Well, moving on here, let's talk about things you can trust your cat uh wait a minute um so you we we all know that we can tag our phones our wallets our keys our computers earbugs anything our luggage

with like tiles and air tags well now uh tile has come out with a new tracker for your cat it's called it's uh from life 360 it's a version of the tile sticker tracker and it goes for your cat. It's from Life360. It's a version of the Tile Sticker Tracker. And it goes on your cat. And you can know exactly where your little fur baby is at any point in the day. This is adorable. You can just sit this on there.

And you can see that your cat is in your house. And on the same couch that you left it six hours ago. Unless you have an outdoor cat. This is the most useless $40 you'll ever spend. Hey, hey, no, it's not. No, it's not. If you have an outdoor cat, it will come in handy. Yeah, my cat has friends.

You know, she goes out during the day. We come home. More of a social life than I do. My cat was lazy. Wow. Or the chance that it like gets outside and you have to look for it forever so been there done that she was terrified of outside she went outside once fell into the pool and never went out again

terrified now this is a good idea and i commonly see people using apple air tags for tracking pets so i think it's a good idea for them to come out with specific products aimed at pets and you know honestly like i've seen there's a lot of devices that are aimed at pets these days you can get gps and lte collars and all that good stuff i feel like a lot of that stuff isn't necessary. You know, maybe if you have like a hunting dog or you're taking your dog out all the time to like strange places, maybe like the LTE and GPS collar would be useful, but like in situations where, you know, it's like a cat where maybe it's not going outside all the time, or maybe you don't need to know like its exact location. You just want to make sure it's you know around the area or something like that these things work great for that yeah it says the

battery the battery in this thing the last three years which is 29 cat years so that's good that's pretty good i swore sometimes i didn't see my cat for like three years so well it's that thing only came back when it really wanted something you know Does that say something about you or the cat? I'm not really sure. I don't know. I don't know. You know, the dog you can let out and he's back before dinner time. You know he's good.

He's like, I know where to get my food. This cat's like, I know where to catch my food. I don't need you. Why is this limited to cats? I was just about to say that. Why is it not good for dogs too? Especially cat-sized dogs, you know? I was going to say maybe it's just got a smaller collar,

so it's more useful for cats. That cat looks bigger than the dog I have, so I mean, I'm sure it would work on my dog. You know? It says the attachment's capable of stretching up to 1.7 times without breaking and is water resistant well oh my cat takes bath all the time so that makes sense yeah exactly my cat loves the rain uh no but the innovative product yeah it looks it's nice it looks like it's just like a smaller collar to be honest they probably just made like a very thin collar for that's probably

wise for cats only yeah yeah a dog would probably need a heavier one or if you had gavin's dog it'd probably be fine yeah he doesn't know he's wearing a cat collar right now that's all we can find for you buddy well for 40 bucks you can get one of these things and, uh, track your cat up to 250 feet away. So there you go. Um, speaking of tracking, uh, well,

not really tracking, but AI is tracking, I guess. Alarm.com has announced the acquisition of Vintra, a software provider of AI powered video analytics for enterprise, for the enterprise and commercial market. Uh, Vintra has a, basically a cloud platform that transfers data from any video management system

into events and actions that you can, and IDs that you can take action on. So this is kind of neat from, Alarm.com's not really known. I guess they do kind of dabble a little bit in business. If you're a small business, Alarm.com's really nice because you can go in and turn on and off like people's alarm codes and have it arm and disarm events and that kind of thing.

But this kind of reads to me like, okay, it's a cloud platform. Like this may be something that alarm.com may integrate with their, their cameras that would, you know, send video up to the cloud. And then in your alarmarm.com app,

you would be able to see, if, for example, a two- or four-wheeled vehicle approached your house. It's kind of cool. Yeah, it would definitely be useful for Alarm.com. They've been acquiring some companies in the past couple of years here. It'd be interesting to see

what they do with it all in the future. Their AI stuff, I think works pretty good too. It's very basic what it is right now. Um, but you know, my notifies me all the time when I said, when I sees a vehicle and a person and everything. So any way they can approve that I would be for, um, and they probably won't increase the price with that either. I wouldn't imagine.

Um, you know, it's a simple add on with alarm.com at the moment. So they're probably just going to roll it into their existing AI stuff or analytics, I should say. Yeah, AI is the hot topic right now, and everybody's got to get in on it, you know? Yeah, it's been a buzzword for a few years. And it kind of gets applied to things that aren't really AI and just more like, well, that's math. Like, it's just basic math yeah um it turns out i learned i learned ai when i was in grade school but uh you are actually um but yeah i i mean this the the the video analytics video analytics stuff is actually

pretty neat to kind of play around with and um we're going to talk about me installing Dockers later on in the show here. But I was kind of tinkering around when we were talking earlier in the week. I said I was going to install this, one of these custom, not custom, open source NVR solutions to see how it worked. And yeah, one of the things you can install

is this AI model right there. So it's not just these big businesses and everything that can get into this. It's like anybody who has basically a computer of just about any size can run one of these. I think that like training the model is what takes all the juice. And then once you have that figured out, like the compute power, it doesn't take too much to like match for the, for the camera to picture. Oh, that's a picture of a dog. That's, that's a dog. You know, it doesn't take too much for it to figure that out and spit out those numbers. So it's pretty cool. Hopefully it

improves their product, uh, in the future. Well, uh, speaking of, uh, improving their product, Netflix, I guess has lost more than 1 million customers in Spain. In the very first three months of 2023, it's a sign that the streaming giants crackdown on password sharing might backfire a little bit. In February, Netflix introduced a 6 euro monthly fee, I guess, for customers in Spain who shared their login details with another household. And we talked about that on the show here. And I guess it's basically,

they lost a million customers over that. Subscription cancellations in the first quarter tripled compared to the previous period, according to this research from Kantar. Of the all remaining Netflix subscribers in Spain, one-tenth said they plan to unsubscribe in the second quarter as well. So not a good deal. Not a good deal. I was just thinking about that today. I haven't logged into my phone to watch something on my phone on Netflix in a while. And I know we have one or two devices

here. If I log in on my phone, is it going to kick me off? I don't even know. I don't even know what plan we're on or anything. But it's just going to be a pain to even deal with anymore. I haven't even logged into Netflix since my sister took back ownership of it. They lost me. You can count me in that number. Are you a Spanish user?

Because you definitely could be counted as part of that hey he's got a vpn over to spain no we haven't had netflix in i think a year now but i think we might try it again we're running out of stuff to watch on hbo max so gotta switch it up some yep yep i i have well there's i have a couple of shows we're watching on netflix right now and i've got like a big queue of stuff we just haven't gotten to so yeah it's still there all right well i don't know if you guys have heard this before but according to a new research report from the swedish analyst this time berg insight the number of smart homes in europe and north america has continued to grow reaching 120.5 million last

year. Basically, in the next five years, half of all smart homes will be smart, or all homes will be smart. Isn't that cool? Like half? I don't think it's going to happen. They say this every five years, and it doesn't happen. So North America leads the way in terms of smart home penetration, with 39.2% of all households in North America having at least one smart home product or system at the end of 2022. Represents a year growth of 12% and the trend is expected to continue over the next five years by 2027. Bergensite estimates that around 88.1 million homes in North America will be smart,

equal to 58% of all homes in the continent. There you go. I'm curious what they're considering, because they say at least one smart home device, right? And everything these days is smart. You have a smart trash can. You have a smart toaster, you know? So to me, that number seems low, you know?

Because consider your Apple TV smart. You can consider your iPhone, I guess, smart, right? Like, I'm curious as to what they consider to be smart. Probably just count on an actual smartphone, to be honest. Maybe they don't because then it would be 100%. No, it's usually things like, okay, cameras, like smart cameras are the number one thing, right? So like your ring cameras, doorbell cameras doorbell cameras, those are those are included in there as well. So that's, that's usually your number one and two. And then a thermostat,

a smart security system. And I think shading and lighting are like further down, but they're not, they're typically not too far down. And then like AV stuff that we all think about, like, oh, that's part of the smart home that doesn't even register for most people. Most people are doing this, like taking the security angle, especially with video doorbells and that kind of thing. So if you, I would say that's probably accurate because like if you walk down my street,

not everybody has a ring doorbell on their house, but a lot of them do. And is it 50%? Is it 20%? Well, it's probably the word like 10% because I live in a retirement state. I don't know if I'd mentioned that before, but yeah, there's not very many people who have internet at their house where I live. But you know, it's, it, the number could be on, on track.

It could be on, on track for what, what, if you consider every literal computer device to be a smart home device. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I feel like the title is a bit of a stretch compared to what the actual research is talking about. No, 58% is more than half. Well, I mean, that's true, but it says half of all homes will be smart

in the next five years. I don't know. I'm thinking way too much into it right now. Because when I think of all smart half of all homes will be smart in the next five years. Like, I don't know. I think I'm thinking way too much into it right now. Because when I think of a smart home, I think of like several devices kind of working together, you know, doing stuff. I don't think of like one device like, oh, I got a smart thermostat. Woo. My heart. My house is smart.

Yeah. Well, I think exactly when you think of a smart home, you think of a bunch of things working together in your house. Right. I totally agree. I don't want one simple having just one device. Yeah. Doesn't make a smart home. Well guys,

according to this article as well. And we have to mention it. The new matter, smart home standards is likely to become a key driver for mass market adoption. Is it now? I swear like this, this one paragraph they have here is just like like like i think the matter alliance or what is it hca home connectivity line or whatever like

paid just all these journalists to drop that one line or one paragraph into everything that has to do with the smart home no they actually had a word count and they had to fill the buffer they were just under the word count so they add this paragraph in there and it gets them the word count oh man well there you go um people people have smart homes i guess except in your neighborhood yeah my neighborhood i guess europe is slightly behind north america it has neighborhoods all old though isn't it uh yeah so how do they if they don't have their smart products, how do they get their silver alerts? They don't, they don't need, they don't need them there for us. That's why they put the signs on the highway.

You don't send Amber alerts to children. All right, let's move on. We've got a new segment this week. I i'm gonna put some fun music behind this but who matters this week well this week um whiz smart bulbs are getting matter yay and then honorable mention nest thermostat is also getting matter uh sometime last week we just we get these articles every week about oh this new product line this product line is activating matter and it's like okay great and i don't know like what to think about it because there's nothing special about a whiz smart bulb like they've been around for a while signify you know it's it's the company that owns hue uh they've been around for a while

they get a lot of products it's nice that they're doing it and they said they were going to do it but it's like okay like it's not really a story but there you are so we're gonna have this who matters this week uh a segment every week because it seems like every week we have somebody to talk about the sound for the background music should be like the traditional like clown music you know because yeah no i was definitely thinking of clown music when i like the carnival thing you know yeah no it'll be there trust me and it's funny every time i see these stories pop up on twitter i always see uh the various people trying to get them working with their matter devices and struggling for any of them to work with

everything and yeah they're just trashing matter at this point yeah i mean what what like even with the whiz one right um it's great that it's getting it. I think it's awesome. But you have to open up their app and do the firmware update, and then you get it. And then you can add it to the thing you were talking about last week, where you had to jump through all these hoops just to get it located on Matter. It's like, well, that's great. But when these things start shipping with that firmware on there then you don't even need to have that that app anymore you don't have to go through those these hoops you don't have to update firmware you don't have to get it on the network update the firmware

you think he has to say that you know well i mean that's that's the whole goal behind all this so like when when whiz stuff starts coming with a little thing on there that says it'll be on there like you'll plug it in and you'll be able to just grab your HomeKit app and, and drop them in the system or your Alexa app and drop them in the system. Just like any other native device, those platforms that works with Alexa or works with HomeKit or whatever. Oh, Seth, you sound so hopeful. I mean, that's really the only thing we can hope for, for matter, right?

Because if they can't manage that, then it's going to be a dead standard and i mean it's a good network it's a solid network topology i'm happy they finally did that we're not we're relying on like wi-fi for everything like why does everything need wi-fi oh wait we're talking about wiz everything needs wi-fi with those guys but like it would be it's nice to to recognize that like you could use another technology for IoT devices and get them off the Wi-Fi because that's, it's, it causes problems. Anyway, that, that wraps up with who matters this week. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found on our show notes at hometech.fm slash 433.

We've got no, nothing to know this week, but we do have a pick of the week. And this one, this is funny. Somebody got a little upgrade on their satellite dish. They've basically strapped, what is this? SpaceX SmartLink antenna or satellite antenna, I guess, for the internet onto the Bell satellite dish. And this is the most rigged up thing I think I've... I have seen a lot of things.

This one almost takes the cake. This is wild. Yeah, they didn't even take it off the mount or anything. They literally just put it on top of the dish and... They just bent the dish down, yeah. Yeah. Problem solved. If the wind blows too strong, that thing might just fall off. Yeah, that's what I'd be worried about.

Oh, they use super glue. Oh. Or gorilla glue. Problem solved. use super glue oh or gorilla glue flex tape holds it on there yeah flex tape yep it was actually when i look at it the more i look at it i'm like yeah i probably would have done that too you know just get the right angle it's working it's working don't touch it yeah yeah just leave it there just leave it there yeah i hope it could support the weight of the the cats that will sit on it to stay warm just stay warm in the winter yeah yeah if your cat goes missing you know your tracker will probably lead it to a starling satellite nice and warm for you yeah there there you go uh one one way to repurpose that that dish that's on the side of your house and it's funny this house actually has another dish located on a lower roof

at the bottom of the house. There's another satellite dish down there. Typical Canadian house has like three or four dishes. A lot of them are facing the States, try and pick up your signals, you know? So, but nowadays a typical house has like three or four dishes, but none of them are hooked up anymore. What do you have? What do you have? What do you have?

They just don't take them down. Yeah, they just didn't take them down. Yeah. Too lazy. You know, like they just leave them there. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to deal you have to deal with it after you take it down. Like, why would you do that?

Yeah. Collect them like Pokemon cards. Good stuff. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, comments picks the week or great ideas for show give us a shout our email address is feedback at hometech.fm or visit hometech.fm feedback and fill out the online form all right all right project updates this week i i've got one project update but gavin i know you've got a couple because we have not only moved into the year of the voice we've we've moved into it's just like john wick right we've moved into the year of the voice chapter two uh so what's going on here home assistant's been

talking about the year of the voice i i opened up this page and they're they've stolen the phone from my grandmother's house and they're using it to text each other yeah so it was pretty much a big week this week for home assistant they released their 2023.5 beta. It has a lot of stuff under the hood related to voice control. I mean, it has a few other smaller things. It's got better controls over what devices are exposed to what voice assistant. They updated this one. I actually really like the web hooks, right? They updated web hooks. And the reason why I like this is because they only used to support post web hooks, but a lot of my video cameras, they only do get web hooks. So now you can have it when my video camera has an action such as, you know, it detects motion. It's, it triggers the web hook using a get command and right away, you know, I can action on

it even when someone rings the doorbell. So it's something it's under the hood but honestly like it makes things so much better just that they implemented it was a lot harder than it sounds too um they added voice over ip integration i'll get into that in a bit um roborock integration and a bunch of breaking changes you know it's beta right now yeah it's always breaking changes beta right now it's going to be released next week now we get into the year of the voice they had a presentation on thursday um it was impressive they were basically showing the next step um in the chain so you know like they they're going piece by piece like almost every every time they do this they show like you have to convert text to speech or speech to text and then into an intent and then transferring it to homelessness.

And like they're breaking it down piece by piece. And it's interesting to see how they're working towards the final goal, right? And this time they have, it's all the speech to text and the text to speech that they were showing off. And they showed off new integrations that they created just to do this. One called Whisper and one called Piper. Piper, they actually developed themselves because they didn't have something out there they could use. And that's their text-to-speech.

Whisper is- And if HBO does not sue them for copyright infringement for fake company work. And Whisper is their speech-to-text, right? And that was really cool because it supports like 130 languages. It's already in the next beta release, so we're going to get to play with it. They were showing off demos and the speed was incredible.

Like when they sent the command, it was incredible. Yes, it does have some, it has cloud dependency, but they're also offering options that will have local processing. So, and they also have integration with chat gpt and stuff like that now the one thing that was really cool is they showed off um the the voice over ip thing so taking a traditional landline phone a rotary phone whatever you know grandma's phone yeah yeah grandmother's phone you hook it up to a little device it it converts it to ip yeah. Yep, your grandmother's phone. You hook it up to a little device. It converts it to IP. And then you can basically just pick up your phone

and talk to your home assistant. You can tell it to turn on the lights. You can tell it to do whatever. And it talks back to you. And with the chat GPT integration, they actually showed it where their kids or whoever was having a conversation with it. And it was pretending to be Mario. You have to actually see the video because it's actually kind of funny right but it was having a full conversation with them um on their phone you

know so you know if you have a uh old grandmother out there you can hook this up in her house and keep her busy all day long you know she needs somebody to talk to, she'll talk to her home assistant. You know, it was pretty impressive. And the one thing, you know, they actually touched upon the wake word.

They haven't gotten to that yet because it's harder than it sounds. Right? But it is something they're working on and tackling

and they still have to figure out how they're going to do wake words. And that's also tied into when it comes to hardware, I guess. So they're working towards that.

I guess that's the next step in the chain. But everything they demonstrated, I highly recommend going to, if you're interested, go to the YouTube video, their YouTube channel, Home Assistant, and just watch the video. The demos were pretty cool to see. And it's always good to see them you know breaking this down and building it out it's fun watch yeah the um the little little screen they have their little rgb screen is actually kind of cool i'm not sure what that is i have something very similar to that but it's not maybe that's what it is i don't know i'm not gonna figure out what that is because i like it um but like they pick this video is very short

it's it's not it's not like 10 minutes longer an hour and a half like their other videos were like you can play this and it it's pretty much over after he picks up the phone says something into it and then it it converts that to text and puts on the little screen that they have there so yeah cool that's just the demo video but the whole the event was about an hour, hour and a half, I think. But they went through a lot of stuff, and a lot of it's very technical. But, you know, and by the time it gets released, it's not as bad. It's going to look as bad. It's very intimidating, you know, but it's very cool.

And I can't wait till they get to the hardware aspect of it, because they're going to address that at some point right you know what what's gonna work best with it they're gonna be working it looks like ESP home they actually showed off a little device with a mic and a speaker in it and they flashed it with ESP home and use that as their device but because they don't have a wake word you have to actually press a button and you can send your command. So it's really cool what they're doing. It's impressive. We talked a little bit about how this works, the wake word before the show. And like the wake word on the big devices, you know, like the HomePods or, you know, the Amazon Echoes, that's like almost baked in to like a little small high performance chip that's only listening for that one word or there's a couple words, you know, depending

on the system, you can change them now. But like, yeah, it's only that's it's only lot in life is to do that one thing. And then once it hears it, it like starts recording whatever you're saying in a little buffer. And then the main processor spins up what it does. It gets online, takes that buffer, starts recording the main processor spins up what it does. It gets online, takes that buffer, starts recording the rest of what you're saying and start streaming it up to

the server in the sky. Or now there's, they're, they're actually processing a little bit of it locally if they can. And, and, and that's how the process for that's going to have to take place. If,

if you're starting off with one of the, even with a little M five stack, Adam, I'm pretty familiar with those. Those even with a little m5 stack atom i'm pretty familiar with those um those are just a little box with a regular microphone like you you'd have to leave the microphone all the time you're gonna they're gonna need to have like the little um that little yellow box you guys um like the home assistant i don't know gold box yellow the home assistant yellow yellow okay yeah yeah um i didn't know that was the name of it but

okay well we we talked about them in the past and like i think they're gonna have to do something like that for a voice assistant it's not impossible like josh ai has done it right like they have yeah a little tiny device the size of a you know my hub bell here and it it it's got it's got led lights on it it's actually a really nice device for a few hundred dollars uh it's got LED lights on it. It's actually a really nice device for a few hundred dollars. It's probably a little more premium than what, you know, Home Assistant may need to put together, especially if you're able to use, like, another computer to do all the processing. All this thing has to do is listen for that wait word,

gather up, you know, what you're saying and stream it over. You know, it's going to be as fast as your network is and that computer is locally. That would be really cool. That would be really nice to see whenever they figure all this out and put it all together all these parts all these little puzzle pieces they're doing right now uh yeah it's only april right well i guess it's may technically but well don't worry there'll be 20 more updates before the end of the month so that's that's how home assistant rules. I think we got six updates this month for the main home assistant, but then I got like three OS updates and how many other updates it's every day. There's a new update

for home assistant, but you don't have to update. You can just update everything once a month, but you'll see on my screen, whenever I see an update button, I accidentally click it every time. You know what, you know what I do is every every time we have one of these stories and you're talking about what's in the update i go i go over to the dashboard and i click the update button and watch it update while you're talking it's that easy it's that easy yeah yeah i mean my mine's usually i'm just going into the settings and i see there's no so i'm like might as well do it uh breaking news here guys uh they've discovered new devices on my network again so toothbrush for your neighbor i don't know why i have a bluetooth adapter um on mine and it keeps picking up passing cars their their cameras in their cars

and stuff like that so i have to actually turn off the you know the discovery for the bluetooth now yeah i don't i don't know what it's discovered that's new. Nothing in here. There's my printer. There's nothing in here that's really new. It just really wants me to add the rest of the stuff in, which I'm not going to. Add everything.

Just disable it so it doesn't rediscover it. Discovered thread. That's fun. We'll let it churn some more cycles on this. At least it got its updates. It'll be happy. All right, All right. All right.

Well, TJ, do you have any big projects or anything you've been up to? Nothing crazy this week. I did a wiring cleanup for a client of mine. Yeah. Yeah. It looks a lot better than it did when I walked in. You know, it's funny. When he initially emailed me about it, he was like, oh, you know, how much would it cost to put some ends on, you know, some cat six cables and, you know, hook up some speakers. And I was like, well,

how many is it? He goes, ah, you know, I think it's like six or eight or something. So I gave him a price and I was like, you know, if it's like eight cables and you know, this, this, and this, it'll be this price. And he goes, okay, let's do it. And then I didn't hear from him for like a year. Right. And then he like randomly reached out to me again and he said, Hey, I want to get this done. And so I scheduled it. I showed up and he goes, all right. Did he say in this time at any point in time that there may be more than no, he literally did not say anything.

And you saw that room. Yes. And so I walked in, I walked in and I said, this is what you were talking about. And he was like, yeah. And I was like, yeah, this is going to take me like two days to clean up. And he was like, no, really? Like two days for real? And I was like, oh, 100%. Like I was expecting to be here for like two hours or something.

Like this is, yeah, you need to schedule two days. And so he went back and forth with the CFO of the household. And after a week or two, he got back to me and we scheduled it. So it was six Monoprice or six, three Monoprice six zone amps and some basic networking stuff. And maybe we'll post some pictures if Seth feels like it. But it was absolutely atrocious before whoever whoever like ran the wiring did just an awful job of running the wire in the first place which then just made everything worse so i would say they put effort into it but i can't

maybe not they did not i mean like all the wires were coming in from different locations like at no point were the wires going into like a central place because like a lot of times what happens is you know people get in there and they mess with the wires and they undo them and all this stuff but like you can just tell whoever ran the wires did not attach them in like a central place they were just thrown into the back room it's in the basement nobody cares about it and it's you know it's 20 zones of audio and you know 50 cat six cables and like a bunch of stuff and it's like you got to do that right the first time yep yep i i will say that the cfo of the house should be happy that you know there's there's more storage now

like you can actually yeah i don't i was told that she doesn't care because it's in the basement in the very far corner so that so getting it approved was a little bit more difficult than i'm sure uh if it was out in the open but well you did a great job the now they have working audio the well not only a working system but you know a little bit more of their house that they could utilize i guess hey you can like walk in there and like look at stuff and be like oh what's that cable oh that's what it is that makes sense oh i even see that you left your label maker sitting on top of the rack there which means that you labeled some wires too so that's nice oh label everything and you know the disadvantage of

going into a house two or three years after it's built is all the labels have been rubbed off so you're guessing what zones are what and running around i should probably check my steps and see how much i actually have so yeah i could i could easily spend another day there it's not the cleanest thing in the world but it is what was possible in two days with doing everything i was asked yeah yeah that's that's quite quite a bit of work wow hey whenever you're you're free i've got about eight wires I need to terminate at my house. Yeah. Might be slightly more than eight. I'm sure I wish I could have seen my mouth drop when I walked into the room.

You know, I just walk back into the little closet. What am I looking at right now? This is it? This is what you're talking about. This is, this gave me the right room. You didn't tell me you had 20 zones of audio. Like I haven't,

you know, even working down in Florida, it was hard to approach 20 zones of audio. Yeah. Not even, I don't even know how big this house is, but like, it's not that big for 20 zones of audio.

Oh, I mean, you can see how the wiring is. Then there was probably a fair amount of system design that went into it as well. So, Oh, a hundred percent. Trust. It's all that big for 20 zones of audio. Oh, I mean, you can see how the wiring is done. There was probably a fair amount of system design that went into it as well. Oh, 100%. Trust it's all done correctly. And it used some weird wire, like 16-4,

but it was blue and yellow. Blue, yellow, red, and black, which I've never seen for speaker wire. Interesting. It's only a 4,000-square-foot house, it says. Yeah, I don't know where they get 20 zones of audio 20 zones of audio in 4 000 square feet they've got all those dvc speakers in every room literally every room has speakers that's wild well yeah good job man that's

a lot of they look like a lot of fun i mean yeah i like those jobs because it's rewarding you know at the end you sit back and you look at it and it's like, would you just look at that? I did that. And in five years, it'll be trashed again. Yeah. Five years and a couple of days, a couple of days. What's this wire? I can't tell where it goes.

Unplug everything. Well, speaking of getting trashed, guess what I did, Gavin? I installed a Docker on my computer. Oh computer oh man where are we going with this you can't even do your unread server but yeah more docker stuff i'm getting nervous already oh man so i was uh i was i was cleaning up some some some work at work and i it was all html pages I was dumb. I haven't worked in HTML in a long time and I just, I don't like it. So it's like YAML, I guess to me at this point. And I got it, all the code, all properly aligned. And I was like, all right. I noticed one of the words I had was misspelled. I'm like, okay, doesn't VS code have a, you know, a spell check

built into it. And it used to, I guess, but I don't know what happened to it. So I looked up for an extension, and there was one in there for language tool. I started reading on it, and I was like, OK, this looks pretty cool. This is kind of looking like what I want. And it's free. It's kind of like open source, and you can download all the stuff and make it happen. They had a Docker install. I'm like, oh, this is like ticking all the boxes, right?

So I go to my own RAID. I just search for language tool, linter, and boom, it comes up. They had a Docker install. I'm like, oh, this is like ticking all the boxes, right? So I go to my own RAID. I just search for language tool, linter, and boom, it comes up. Like it's there. And there's special instructions in there, like what commands you need to go in and run and all this stuff. I'm like, this is going to be so easy.

I get it up and going and everything's running. It looks like it's running right. I'm looking at the logs. Nothing's happening. It's not working. It's not talking. My computer's not talking to my other computer. I can ping it. I'm going to the command line i'm doing all

the command tests that they they tell you to do to try and test the thing to see if it works nothing's working like what's going on um gevin i don't know if you if you can see let me let me just paste this into the the uh the the slack channel that we have here and if you can see probably what was the uh the cause the root cause of my my uh my issue here oh wait oh you changed the port number yeah i used a common port so like for about an hour i'm sitting there banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why this stupid thing is working and it's because i used a common port and it just wasn't i think it's like no, you're not going to get that. So yeah, I love computers. I love them so much.

They work so well. Everyone should have a smart home. What port was it before 8080 you were using? You sent 8081 to 8080? Let's see. It was 8010, I guess, is the output port that it wanted to be on. But I must have changed it at some point

or the Docker that I installed on. The package that was in Unraid must have been 8081 which is already used and it wasn't gonna give up that port for anything else so yep well whenever you're setting up a docker on unraid if you scroll to the bottom it'll show you all the ports that are currently being used by everything else oh yes so sometimes you try that. You're trying to find that one open port, you know, because you go with all your favorites and then now you're at a point where you got to find one. And yeah, I always have to do that.

Yeah, I have to control F that page and just search for the port. And if it comes up, I can't use it because there's so many ports on that stupid thing. But yeah, I just, I found one and I just added one to it and use that. So now I think it's on like 3002 or something um which i know isn't used but yeah fun stuff uh computers love them so much that yeah docker is funny because if you map the drive wrong for

example you can create a problem where it starts to fill up inside the docker you know um you have to be careful with some of these command lines but once you get to know know it you weren't careful once you get to know it though it makes a lot of sense honestly seth i think at this point you should just ban computers from your house it might be easier yeah yeah or hire hire me yeah i'll set them up for you. What a nice guy. Not free. I did get my TensorFlow sort RT models or whatever thing working. So that Docker is up and going. But the frigate camera thing, forget.

Yeah, it's the bird. Forget. I didn't get that started yet. So I think I still have more to do i was watching a video yesterday on how to set up the frigate uh dockers and i got i got part way through that that video and i was thinking of sending it to you but then just looking at the video i go he's not gonna pay attention to this there's a lot of commands for him he's gonna screw something up some point,

you know, and spend hours trying to figure out why he chose the port he chose. You know, there's too many instructions. It doesn't make any sense. It's not, it's, it's a little complicated of an install. I will say that that particular package is very,

again, YAML based. Yes. I don't know why that people think this is the right way, right thing to do. They're wrong but um yeah the whole it's like oh you need a config file we're not going to give you one but here's an example and it's like pages of uh yaml code i'm like no no there's no this thing has no

front end to it no setup like no like add a camera put the rst rtsp no no no it's all in a config file uh not looking forward to it yeah i've gotten pretty good with yamo now um the key was i got a good editor that lets me fold a lot of the yamo code so i can clean it up so it doesn't make it right yeah it doesn't make it like that right you know i gotta work with what i gotta work with you know and yeah yaml is what i gotta work with and i will use it well i i am gonna give it a swing because i this the package the little nvr software vms or whatever you want to call it looks kind of interesting and um it's either this or i install blue iris which is more painful i don't know but the i'll say i i showed you the the integration

before the integration with frigate and um and home assistant is amazing like everything will be in a dashboard you know because they don't have an app right so having it integrated with home assistant that will become your app and it's really cool what it does. Well, yeah, I only think I would use on it at this point because I don't use Home Assistant for anything other than my water detection meter thing outside that tells me how much water I use when I flush the toilet. And then the lightning strike detector, and that's it. Such a basic user.

Yeah, I know. It's got millions of little code things in there for me to use. And I'm like, no, I think I'm good with these two graphs i made the water temperature and lightning strikes you have two devices and probably 500 entities from them and you know a bunch of yaml yeah no fun no fun well uh so i i've seen how much i love home technology and and and and that kind of thing and computers and that stuff but um there's this show on Apple TV right now called hello tomorrow, which is kind of like door-to-door salesman life in the 19, what fifties or something, uh, the atomic household kind of stuff going on. And like they have hover cars and all the stuff that we were promised,

you know? Um, but it's a fun little, it's, it it's I don't know. It's a fun little show about them selling tickets to the moon and going, you know, door to door and shenanigans ensue. And what's fun is watching like the little small bits of like what do they call it? Set design that pop up from time to like it's all art deco, which, you know, I'm a sucker for anyway. But it's it's they've got like everybody'm a sucker for anyway, but they've got like, everybody has a little sign on their house with their name on it in a certain font.

And the signs are all different, but they have little lights that blink on them. Some of them blink this light. It's really cool. All the little tiny pieces of thought that went into making that show. And they've got robots that make drinks and like it serves beer out of its stomach

and then goes, hey, buddy, my eyes are up here, which I thought was... It was a funny joke the first time, but then you hear it in the background making that same joke all the way down the bar. So I can imagine that probably got old. But it's a cute little show. They have put some

decent writing in on it. Gavin, I think you watched a little bit of it went a little bit further than I have. Yeah, I went a few episodes in and the wife, she gave up on it. She was like, all right, I'm tired of this show. I started to get tired of it because it went in a direction I wasn't expecting it to go in. But, you know, I hate giving up on things, but I don't mind procrastinating. So I added it to my list to finish later. Right. So I didn't give up on it. I'll watch it later. It's got, it's got Hank Azaria in it too. So like, you know, he's always fun to watch or listen to if you like watching the Simpsons.

So anyway I think that wraps up everything here. We 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 our Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can help help Hometech for as little as a dollar a month. Any pledge over five bucks gets you a big shout out here on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private Slack chat, the hub where you and others are supporters of the show can get it every day and look for our silver members. Where are you? I don't know. And you can also see TJ's rack. If you like,

if you like looking at racks, TJ's posting pictures of racks. Let's see. If you'd like to help out the show, but can't support financially, totally understand. Just appreciate a five-star review on iTunes or positive rating in in the podcast app of your choice that wraps another week here up on home tech everybody have a great weekend and we will see you next week take care i think he's he's muted he's muted. He's muted again. I didn't feel like saying anything that time. All right, fine.

Fine. Just be me. Stop f***ing listening to us. It's the end. What are you still here for? It's the end of the month. Make sure your credit card for Patreon's up to date. Did I hit record? Oh, yeah, I did.