One Home, One Screen — and Next, Just Ask
A home full of different smart-home brands can work like one system. Here's what that looks like in our founder's own house, and where it goes next: just saying what you want.
Most homes don't have one smart-home brand. They have six or seven. Bulbs from one company, switches from another, a TV from a third, speakers and door locks from a few more — and an app for every one of them.
Our founder's home is no different: Cync and Tapo bulbs, Leviton and Kasa switches, Samsung TVs, Apple HomePods, Sonos speakers, and Aqara and Tapo door locks. So we did there what we do for homeowners: brought it all together.
One screen for the whole house
Everything now runs through Home Assistant, on a small computer that lives in the house. A touch-screen panel on the wall shows every light, switch, and lock in one place — no matter who made it.
A few things that make daily life easier:
- TV time limits for the kids. Each kid's TV has a nightly curfew. Parents can add extra time for a night with a tap, "ground" a TV, or pause the curfew for a few nights when guests are over.
- Music in every room — together. Pick a playlist and choose which rooms play it: Sonos, HomePods, even the TVs' built-in speakers, all in sync.
- A fireplace or the beach on any TV. Relaxing ambience videos are stored right in the home and sent to any TV with one tap. There's no streaming service to pay for, and nothing new to install on the TVs, so the parental locks on the kids' TVs stay exactly as they were.
What's next: just ask
Remembering whether it's the "nightstand lamp" or the "end table lamp," or what a routine was named, shouldn't be your job.
The next step is an AI assistant — Claude, from Anthropic — connected to the house. Instead of memorizing names, you'll be able to say something like "I want to watch a movie in the living room," and the house will work out the rest: dim the lights, turn on the TV, and bring up the sound.
You can still set up routines for the things you do every day, and they'll run faster. But for anything new, you can simply describe what you want.
Safety comes first
Some things should never be left to interpretation. In this setup, the AI cannot unlock a door or open the garage, however it's asked. Locking and closing are allowed; unlocking and opening are done by a person. That limit is built into the system, not left to the AI's judgment.
Your home, your data
The control system, the wall panel, and the video library all run on a computer inside the home, not on a service you rent. The AI assistant will be the one piece that reaches out to the internet, and it only sees the devices it's been given permission to control.
The full story of how it was built — and what comes next — is here: Describe It, Don't Name It.
If your home has a drawer full of smart-home apps, we can help you turn them into one.