Comment by silverlight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silverlight | Hacker News Reader

I'm not usually one to hop on something and criticize when it's a Show HN.

But I have literally everything that this is doing already set up in my home right now using an Amazon Echo, which is $200, instead of $10,000.

I can say "Trigger lights for projector", and lights dim how I want it. Or "Trigger lights for guests" and bing, lights. I can say "Play my Lumineers station on Pandora", and my Echo will play it. And of course I can ask Echo all kinds of things like "What is the distance to the moon?" or "What is the population of India?"

Plus a lot more.

So what is the value add here? How is this different/better than Echo + IFTT + a Wink hub? I'm really genuinely curious, because this is something I am doing right now and am totally willing to spend money on to do better, but based on this short video I have no idea how this is better...

So I guess take that as constructive feedback from (presumably?) your target audience -- show me something really cool this does to get me to consider spending $10k on it.

One thing I don't like about Echo, IFTT, and others like them is the fact that everything has to go through "the cloud." If I'm sitting at home and want to dim my lights, why do I need to send my voice to Amazon's server, have it call out to IFTT, which calls back into my home? Especially since I have a data cap. All of that can easily just go through a locally-installed system and you don't need expensive hardware to do it.

That's what's driven me to write my own home automation code. (Though my code's terrible, not HN-worthy.) Anything that insists on a cloud API is out in my book. A local server is potentially worth serious money, especially if it's easy to use.

I've been toying with something similar (mostly on paper so far) involving custom GStreamer elements for voice recognition/synthesis, a Wit.ai-like intent resolver for command & control, and ChatScript-like pattern matching for conversational dialogue. My goal is to put it all behind a WebRTC and SIP gateway and have a low-latency personal assistant that I can access from virtually any device (even an old landline telephone) and that runs on my own private server. That's the dream anyway. I'm stuck on the voice synthesizer, at the moment...

I started at device control. Once I get device control where I want it on my home server, I'll expand out to being able to reach it elsewhere, and then voice.

Would that really be a significant source of data usage?

Depending on how often I use it and the audio formats, it could be. Maybe not for someone with a 300GB/mo cap, but I'm stuck with 15, so every megabyte counts. Either way, my point is that there's no reason for it to use any data at all to control devices on my own local network.

All good points. With Josh, we're targeting large homes with complex environments. Our goal is to make it super simple to set up, configure, and use Josh. While Echo + IFTTT + a Wink hub might not sound too complicated to someone on HN, it's far too hacky for a 10,000 sq ft home where the average home owner doesn't want to understand what's truly going on.

We're also focused as much on home monitoring and access when you're away from the home as we are on control from within. It might seem subtle, but the number of times you want eyes and ears and the ability to change the environment of your home when away is super important.

The longer term play which will take some time to realize is all about AI. We see Josh as an invisible companion that grows with you, understands natural language, and can interact with the connected devices around you.

Fair enough. I mean in that case I would probably have spent some time in the video showing how easy it was to set up all the devices to work with Josh. Since what you're saying is that while the end result is about the same (currently), the setup is easier. As you said not really for me then since I like having the hackability of using IFTT to do all sorts of things, but I can see how someone in a 10k sqft home might not want to deal with it.

Of course that's a pretty small audience, so there you go. "Sell to the classes, eat with the masses", as they say...

10,000 sq ft home

average home owner

Seems like you're targeting multimillionaires. Just looking at the Portland metro area (nowhere near the largest target market), there are about 6 homes currently for sale that are over 10k sqft. Ranging from 1.5M way out in the burbs to 8M+. It's likely going to need quite a lot of polish to have a large uptick for such a small total audience.

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