Spring is my busy season. Since my kids were old enough to play team sports, the impending arrival of March brings an avalanche of organizational tasks. Practice schedules, game schedules, and snack signups equal so many dates to remember. They arrive in different ways — paper flyers, Excel sheets, text chains, or through yet another team sports app — but somehow never in a Google Calendar link. It’s a trying time. 

But this year, I have a new assistant: Sidekick, an AI-powered planning feature for the Skylight Calendar. I just forward every lengthy email to my Sidekick and upload pictures of schedules and spreadsheets to its app. From there, the AI parses the data, packages it into events, and pushes those to my Google Calendar and to my family’s calendars on the big, bright, 27-inch Skylight Calendar Max smart display that’s mounted by our breakfast counter for all to see. 

I’m now prepared to tackle two high school sports seasons, along with all the other scheduling chaos that comes with being a busy working parent to two busy teens. It has taken a decade and significant advances in AI to get here, but parents, this is a game-changer. 

The Skylight Calendar Max ( …

Read the full story at The Verge.

In a first for a smart thermostat company, Tado is exploring charging its customers £1 / €1 a month just to control their devices from its app. Multiple users have reported that Tado, manufacturers of smart thermostats, radiator valves, and heat pump controllers for Europe and the UK, sent a message through their app alerting them to the impending charge.

According to a post on the Tado community forum earlier this month, one customer received a notification saying the company would start charging the fee — which would be per household — on May 1st, 2025. A user on Reddit in the Netherlands saw a different notice, an app screen that appeared to require him to subscribe starting February 19th, 2025.

The notification said the new fee was due to the company facing increased costs. It notes that users will still be able to use integrations through Apple Home, Google Home, and Amazon Alexa to control their system for free.

Currently, Tado offers optional subscription fees ranging from €3.99 to €5.99 a month for services such as an auto-assist function and intelligent energy shifting, both of which purport to save on energy costs. However, using the app to schedule and control the Tado system has always been free.

A Tado moderator on the community forum told the original poster that the message was a test and that no one had lost free access to the app: “Like lots of other companies, we routinely do marketing tests and research, plus we look at customer feedback every day. Those involved in this test retained full access to the tado° App with no charge,” they wrote.

Tado spokesperson Jason Collie initially declined to provide an attributable statement to The Verge, as is required by our background policy. After publication, Collie demanded that we issue a correction for writing that Tado would not comment and suggested that we could have cited an unattributed statement to him anyway. The statement is essentially the same as the one posted by a Tado forum account that we had already included in full in this story. “As is typical in the industry, tado° is routinely doing marketing tests and research, and looks at customer feedback every day. Those involved in this test retained full access to the tado° App,” Collie wrote.

If this was just a test, it was a bad move on Tado’s part not to make that clear in the messaging it sent out to users. However, if Tado is testing this, it’s obviously considering implementing this fee. That would be another bad move.

Charging users to control their devices with the app might temporarily increase revenue but could cost the company in the long run as customers jump ship or stop recommending the product to friends and family — something several users on the community thread indicated they would be inclined to do.

It’s one thing to increase subscription fees or add new features and capabilities for an extra cost, but making users pay for something that was once free — and which every other smart thermostat company offers with no charge — is an almost guaranteed way to lose customers.

Update, February 20th: Added response from Tado spokesperson Jason Collie.

Anker’s smart home arm, Eufy, has announced its first smart lock that uses palm vein recognition to unlock your door. The $399 FamiLock S3 Max is also a video doorbell with a 2K-capable camera and an interior screen that shows a live video feed through the door lock. The S3 works over Wi-Fi 6 and supports Matter for integration with most smart home ecosystems, including Apple Home and Amazon Alexa.

Palm unlock is a new biometric feature on residential locks, joining fingerprint unlock and facial recognition as new ways to access your home. Philips, TCL, and TP-Link Tapo all recently launched models that unlock by waving your hand over an infrared sensor. Research shows that palm vein recognition is more accurate and secure than fingerprint readers, in part because it works by recognizing that blood is flowing through your veins.

Most people who want a smart lock for their home probably aren’t worried about James Bond-style villains swiping their dead fingers, but there are practical reasons families might find palm unlock a better fit. Some younger kids and those with older hands can find fingerprint readers finicky, and a hand wave requires less precision than hitting a small fingerprint reader. However, it does requires your hand to be free, which the other new unlocking method, UWB-unlocking (which reacts to the presence of your smartwatch or phone), doesn’t.

The FamiLock S3 Max supports up to 50 different palm prints — according to Eufy, the prints are stored locally on the device. In addition to waving, you can also use a keycode on the touchscreen keypad, the Eufy app, or a physical key to unlock the door. 

The S3 has a 15,000mAh removable rechargeable lithium battery, plus the option of providing extra power with four AAA batteries. Eufy says this keeps the device online while you’re charging the main battery. Eufy promises between six and 12 months of battery life, depending on use. The lock also has the highest ANSI/BHMA Grade 1 certification,

The 2K camera has a 150-degree vertical and 180-degree diagonal field of view for a head-to-toe perspective of your porch

The S3’s 2K camera has a 150-degree vertical and 180-degree diagonal field of view, providing a head-to-toe perspective that should be able to see packages on your porch as well as people. With 8GB of onboard storage, there’s no required subscription for viewing recorded footage.

The camera can connect to Eufy’s hub, the HomeBase 3, for smart alerts, facial recognition, and increased local storage, and works with Amazon Alexa and Google Home smart displays. It’s worth noting that Eufy had serious security and privacy incidents in 2022 around its cameras. The company says it worked with cybersecurity experts and published a new set of privacy commitments on its website last year.

If you don’t like relying on an app or smart display to see who’s at your door, the S3’s screen shows a live feed on the door lock (there’s also a cheaper version without the screen for $349). Eufy says the screen will turn on within one second of the camera sensing motion, so you can more easily see who is at the door before opening it, which should be quicker than pulling up the Eufy app on your phone. This “digital peephole” could also be useful for people in the house without access to the app, such as a child or a babysitter. 

Lockly announced a similar smart lock with a screen at CES earlier this year. Its Vision Prestige uses facial recognition to unlock but it isn’t launching until Q4 and will cost $499. Eufy’s FamiLock S3 Max launches on March 17 for $399 on Amazon and Eufy’s online store, but existing Eufy customers can pre-order now on eufy.com for a $70 discount.

Despite the way it seems, Amazon doesn’t sell everything. To fix this, the company is beta-testing a new shopping feature that will include products it doesn’t sell in search results on its app, and then send you to the brand’s website to purchase them.

In a blog post published this week, Amazon announced that this new “Shop brand sites directly” feature is currently in beta testing on its shopping app. “When customers who have access to the beta search for a brand and/or item, we’ll show relevant products found in Amazon’s store as well as select products we don’t carry that are available directly on another brand’s website,” said the company. Clicking on the product will redirect you to the brand’s website (with a popup alert that you’re leaving Amazon) where you can buy the product directly.

It’s not clear if Amazon will get a cut of that purchase, and the company hasn’t shared which brands are participating in the beta. However, if the brand uses the Buy With Prime option Amazon launched a couple of years ago, you can use your Prime benefits — such as free shipping — at the external store.

Amazon VP Rajiv Mehta said the new feature is designed to expand selection and “make shopping even more convenient for customers.” The option to shop directly from a brand’s site is currently only available to some U.S. customers in the Amazon Shopping app on iOS and Android. Amazon says it plans to expand the feature to more users and incorporate more brands based on feedback from the beta test.

We’ve got more evidence that Apple is developing a tabletop robot for the home, courtesy of a blog post published on Apple’s Machine Learning Research site. First spotted by MacRumors, the post summarizes a paper by an Apple research team that developed a robot with expressive movements to see how much more engaging it is than a standard robot. And there’s a video.

The video shows a researcher completing tasks with two robots, one labeled “Expressive” and the other labeled “Functional,” and the former is way more fun.

Both robots are desk-style lamps on an articulating arm, with what appears to be an LED light, camera, speaker, and projector built in. They respond to gestures and voice commands and have a voice that sounds suspiciously like Apple’s Siri. One of them exhibits a lot of personality.

When the researcher in the video plays music, the “Expressive” robot lamp dances with her; when she asks about the weather, it looks outside first; when she’s working on an intricate project, it follows her movements to shed light more helpfully; when it reminds her to drink water, it pushes the glass toward her. When she tells it it can’t come out on a hike with her, it hangs its head in faux sadness.

The Functional version — pictured side-by-side doing the same tasks — remains immobile unless required to move as part of the task. It’s a remarkably effective demonstration of how adding human characteristics to an object can make it more relatable and even more functional.

Numerous reports have indicated that Apple is developing more devices for the home — including a smart display and a tabletop robot. These could both act as a personal assistant with Siri, a FaceTime video-calling device, and a smart home control center. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported the robotic device could ship in 2026 or 2027 and may cost around $1,000.

Not that Apple is explicitly developing this particular Pixar-style lamp for our homes. It’s hard to see how a lamp robot without a screen would be able to serve all of those purposes, although the video does show the robot equipped with a projector at one point. But this project — which is being led by Yuhan Hu, Peide Huang, Mouli Sivapurapu, and Jian Zhang — is designed to prove that a robot needs to be expressive to encourage us to interact with it.

After watching the video, though, I’m sold on the lamp. This thing is stinking cute and seems to be far more functional than any smart speaker in my house.

Have you thought about what you’re going to do when your smart fridge is too old to download its latest software update? While you’d probably replace your phone or computer when its software hits its end of life, your fridge will still keep your food cold even if it can’t stream TikToks like those fancy newer models can.

As connected devices grow old, they can potentially fuel botnet attacks

As connected devices in our homes, such as smart TVs, thermostats, and appliances, grow old and lose security updates, they can potentially become targets to help fuel botnet attacks — and new research by Consumer Reports shows that most owners aren’t aware of the risks. 

Botnet attacks are a risk not only to your home network but also to national security. The attacks mean hackers use a network of infected devices to bring down a server or website via a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), potentially taking useful services or critical infrastructure offline for extended periods of time.

IoT gadgets have been involved in several attacks over the years, including the infamous Mirai attack nearly a decade ago. As the smart home matures, so does the number of susceptible “zombie devices” — connected devices that are still online but not getting necessary security updates. 

The good news is that most smart appliances are designed to carry out their primary function without an internet connection, so the simple fix when they’ve reached the end of their “smart” life is to disconnect them from Wi-Fi and carry on. This should make sure your aging smart thermostat doesn’t become the equivalent of an extra on The Walking Dead — no longer alive but capable of great harm. 

However, in most cases, devices like Wi-Fi routers, smart speakers, and streaming sticks won’t work unless they’re online. If these devices aren’t getting security updates, you should stop using them immediately. Just this week, Taiwanese router maker Zyxel said it wouldn’t patch two actively exploited vulnerabilities found in its routers and told customers to stop using them. 

But how are you supposed to know when your smart home gadget has reached this fragile state? And wouldn’t you have liked to know this was going to happen before you purchased it? Ideally, companies need to publicize how long they’ll support products and warn consumers once their devices are no longer secure. 

A new survey from Consumer Reports published this week shows — somewhat unsurprisingly — that over 40 percent of Americans had no idea that their smart gadgets might lose software support one day. And nearly 70 percent of the 2,130 people surveyed believe that smart appliances such as fridges, washing machines, and ovens should continue to work even after losing support. 

The consumer advocacy publication is calling for companies to provide a minimum guaranteed support timeframe for any connected product — an expiration date, so to speak. “A manufacturer can extend this time, but for every connected product they sell, a manufacturer must provide a pledge to provide software updates for a minimum amount of time that they disclose at the point of sale and on the product web page,” writes Stacey Higginbotham, a policy fellow with Consumer Reports.

While smartphone and PC manufacturers are fairly good at alerting customers when their devices have reached their end of life, few manufacturers of smart home devices publish the expiration dates of their products or reliably inform customers when a device is no longer receiving software updates. 

Consumer Reports is calling for companies to provide a minimum guaranteed support timeframe for any connected product

According to Consumer Reports, less than 40 percent of those surveyed knew that a device they owned had lost support because the manufacturer notified them. The rest heard about it through the media or realized only once their device stopped working properly. 

There are some companies making good-faith efforts here. Consumer Reports singles out Amazon, Google, and Signify (the manufacturer of Philips Hue lighting) for having plans in place for software lifespans.

For example, in its end-of-support policy, Philips Hue states it will continue to support its lightbulbs with security updates for a minimum of five years from the day you buy them. This list on Amazon shows how long its Echo smart speakers and displays will get security updates, and Google has a similar resource for its smart home products.

According to Consumer Reports’ research, only 3 out of 21 appliance brands publicize how long they guarantee updates to their appliances’ software and applications. However, you still have to dig through websites to find any of this information. 

It’s a significant shift for a consumer to think about the software lifespan of appliances like fridges, washing machines, and thermostats when they’re looking to buy them, but it’s an important one.

The Consumer Reports survey shows that around 70 percent of respondents believe manufacturers should be required to disclose how long they’ll support the software in their devices. Publishing an expiration date for security support at the point of sale would help people understand the risks as well as the benefits of buying connected devices.

But you can see why manufacturers aren’t keen to advertise that the $200 smart thermostat you’re thinking about buying might stop functioning as you’d expect in a decade or that it might become a security risk or an expensive paperweight. Additionally, smaller companies can struggle to plan that far ahead. 

It’s a significant shift to think about the software lifespan of home appliances like fridges, washing machines, and thermostats

Smart thermostat company Ecobee recently ended support for its original smart thermostat after 16 years and doesn’t guarantee how long it will support its current line. While Ecobee’s track record is very good here — it still supports the Ecobee3 model it launched in 2014 — it’s understandably hard for companies to see into the future. 

Of course, there’s nothing stopping companies from extending their timeframes. Amazon-owned router company Eero guarantees updates for at least 5 years after a device is last available to buy, meaning support for its second-gen Eero — which is still available to buy — jumped from 2027 to 2030. However, that doesn’t address the concern that someone might choose not to buy the device based on an expiration date. 

The FTC is also paying attention here. Last year, it issued a report stating that almost 90 percent of connected devices it reviewed didn’t offer information on how long software support would be provided and that this could be a violation of federal law.

One potential solution lies in the US Cyber Trust Mark Program, which the FCC launched last month. The mark — accessed via a QR code on a product’s packaging or link on a website — provides details about a product’s security, including its “minimum support period end date.” This data can be easily updated by a company, making it more fluid than stamping an expiration date on the product. 

But the Cyber Trust Mark Program is brand new and voluntary, meaning there’s no guarantee you’re going to see one on your next smart TV, nestled alongside the Energy Star label.

Considering the potential far-reaching security concerns around these zombie devices, there’s a strong argument to be made that companies should be forced to provide this data. Whether that’s using the Cyber Trust Mark, the Product Security Verified Mark being developed by the Connectivity Standards Alliance, or through other forms of legislation, this is a problem that needs a solution. 

Amazon sent out five different invites to its upcoming product event, and when pieced together, they spell out a familiar word: Alexa, the name of the company’s digital voice assistant.

We assumed the event would be about Alexa’s long-heralded renaissance, and given this message, plus Amazon telling Reuters that the event will be Alexa-focused, it seems certain the new Alexa will arrive this month.

The not-so-hidden message suggests that at the event, which is being held on February 26th in New York City, Amazon will launch the new generative AI-powered version of its voice assistant. First announced in September 2023, this “New” Alexa has suffered numerous delays along with reported struggles to merge Alexa’s existing capabilities with the revamped voice assistant. But it looks like it’s go time.

Reuters also reports that, according to people familiar with the matter, the upgraded Alexa debuting at the event will show off new features, including responding to multiple prompts in sequence and acting “as an ‘agent’ on behalf of users by taking actions for them without their direct involvement.”

Amazon will roll out the new Alexa to a limited number of users first, and it will initially be free, according to Reuters. When the new Alexa was first announced, Amazon’s former head of Devices & Services, Dave Limp, told The Verge they might charge for the service but would keep the “Classic Alexa” free. Subsequent reports indicated Amazon was considering charging as much as $10 a month for it.

However, there is still a chance the New Alexa will be a no-show. Reuters also reports that Amazon executives have scheduled a “Go/No-go” meeting for February 14, where they will “make a final decision on the ‘street readiness’ of Alexa’s generative AI revamp.”

Amazon sent out invites today for a February event in New York City. The invite gives few clues as to what will be announced at the event, which will be hosted by Panos Panay and the Amazon Devices & Services team on February 26th.

However, a blue swirly logo behind the words “You’re invited” does give off strong Alexa vibes, and it seems very likely that the company will finally officially launch its new supercharged Alexa digital assistant.

Amazon skipped its traditional Fall hardware event in 2024 amid rumors it was struggling to get its smarter Alexa in suitable shape for launch. The company announced a new, better Alexa powered by LLMs in September 2023 but has yet to ship this promised improved digital assistant. The company has said it plans to charge for the new Alexa.

This will be the first big event hosted by Panos Panay since he joined the company from Microsoft in 2023, replacing Dave Limp as the head of Devices & Services at Amazon. He hosted a small event for media when the new Kindles were launched in October of last year. Devices & Services is the group responsible for Echo smart speakers, Fire TVs, Kindles, and Alexa, among other products.

Imagine walking up to your front door and it unlocks — even opens — automatically as you approach. It may sound like the stuff of smart home dreams, but it could soon be a reality, thanks to ultra-wideband (UWB) technology arriving on smart locks. 

With its precise, real-time location capabilities, UWB enables a smart lock to react to the presence of your phone or smartwatch as you approach your door, unlocking it with no intervention on your part. Both the lock and your device need a UWB chip, but this touchless experience means there’s no need to pull out your phone, fiddle with keycodes, fingerprints, or, god forbid, an actual key.

I got to demo the first locks to support the wireless communication protocol at CES last month, and I am ready for my hands-free smart lock future.

Fast, easy, and frictionless, hands-free unlocking is the kind of convenience the smart home needs

I test a lot of smart door locks and haven’t used a house key in a decade. But unlocking my front door still isn’t a frictionless experience: fingerprint readers are fast but can be finicky, Home Key is smooth but limited to Apple devices, keycodes slow me down, and palm readers and facial scan …

Read the full story at The Verge.

This month, JetBlue announced it has added Venmo as a payment option for booking a flight on jetblue.com. The company says the feature will come to the JetBlue mobile app later this year. Now, instead of entering your card details or using PayPal, you can choose to pay for your ticket with your Venmo balance or with the bank account, credit, or debit card linked to your Venmo account.

JetBlue is the first airline to accept payments from the peer-to-peer payment app, which is owned by PayPal. Like Apple Pay, Google Pay, or PayPal itself, Venmo lets you complete a transaction without having to dig out your credit card or input your financial details into the website.

Currently, you can only use Venmo to pay for tickets, so that EatUp Box on your flight home will need a more traditional form of cashless payment. However, Venmo thinks its users will welcome the new option, especially as a way to solve some of the pain points of paying for group trips. Using the company’s Groups feature, which lets users track, split, and manage group expenses, paying for flights with Venmo should make that bachelorette party trip to Charleston a little easier to plan.

Here’s how to buy your next JetBlue ticket using Venmo:

• Head to jetblue.com and choose your flight
• At the checkout page, under More Payment Options select Venmo
• Scan the QR code with the Venmo app on your phone
• Process the payment in the app using your Venmo balance or a linked account or card.

The CSA, Thread Group, and Wi-Fi Alliance say they’re working together to fix the problems that have plagued the smart home standard in its first two years. In this exclusive interview, I ask them how and when.

Read the full story at The Verge.

Samsung announced today that its connected appliances and smart home devices will soon be able to act as motion and sound sensors for its smart home platform SmartThings. This includes its televisions, Music Frame speaker, Family Hub fridge, and more. The company said the updates are slated for release in 2025 and 2026 but didn’t provide specific timelines.

The move is part of its vision of “AI for All,” using AI to simplify technology in the home. By leveraging sensors in its appliances, Samsung’s new Home AI — an artificial intelligence layer that the company is applying to its connected devices — can gather “insights from everyday life to create personalized experiences to fit your needs, transforming your home into a smarter, more efficient space,” according to a Samsung blog post.

This ambient sensing will use motion and sound sensors in Samsung appliances to suggest automations and experiences based on wellness, security, energy savings, and entertainment. It will enable SmartThings to “recognize you and understand your daily activities like cooking, exercising, sleeping, etc., so your home can create the perfect environment for you,” according to Samsung.

Image: Samsung

While that sounds slightly creepy, there are certainly benefits to having sensors built into devices to make your home react the way you want it to — the simplest being automating your lighting. The alternative to achieving any real home automation is to stick little white plastic sensors everywhere. Samsung says the data from its sensors will be fed to Home AI to create more sophisticated automations that can detect and respond to specific activities.

For example, Samsung says motion sensors in a Samsung TV can “detect what kind of exercise you’re doing, guide you on your form, and provide the optimal exercise time for maximum results.” If you sit down in a chair, SmartThings can automatically turn on the nearby reading lamp and adjust the room to your preferred temperature. Samsung says it can also “identify your miniature pinscher jumping onto the couch, activating the air purifier to remove allergens from the air.” And if you’re drying your hair, a device with a speaker, like the Samsung Music Frame, can hear the hair dryer and tell the Samsung robot vacuum to come vacuum up the hair you’ve shed.

Presumably, these “experiences” will be ones you can choose to set up in the SmartThings app, and the robot vacuum isn’t just going to come at you as soon as you start drying your hair. Samsung says that all data from the sensors used by Home AI is stored locally on your SmartThings hub and does not go to the cloud.

Samsung didn’t state exactly what type of technology it’s using in its sensors, but from the specific motion detections mentioned, it’s likely to be mmWave radar sensing, which is becoming popular in the smart home in devices from Aqara and Meross. That’s the only sensing technology outside of cameras that’s precise enough to react to specific movements rather than just motion in general.

The Verge has reached out to Samsung to find out which of its TVs and appliances are currently equipped with these ambient sensors. We also asked if third-party sensors connected to SmartThings can work with the new technology or if it’s limited to Samsung devices at launch. We’ll update this post as we get any new information.

Image: Samsung

Samsung also announced updates to its Map View feature, a layout view of your home that gives you a visual interface to interact with connected devices from your phone, computer, and TV. Map View will get a generative AI upgrade that Samsung says will give it “a deeper understanding of your home’s unique layout and environment, adding more personalization to your Map View.”

You’ll be able to personalize your map by adding photos of your furniture and other objects, and Samsung says this will help the system respond to your presence more accurately. “For example, the system might adjust your lighting or temperature settings based on your proximity to certain areas or objects.”

All of these updates address a major pain point of the smart home — context. If we want our homes to respond to us without the need for voice commands or pulling out an app, they need data about our activities, movements, and preferences. Beyond having a user input everything manually, sensors are the most effective way to get this data. By turning its appliances into sensors, Samsung is adding a big piece of the smart home puzzle to its ecosystem.

Lights that turn on when you walk into a room and turn off when you leave are one of the most desirable smart home features. But you need to buy additional hardware like motion sensors to make this “magic” happen. A new ambient sensing technology called Sensify could make this easier by turning your light bulbs into motion sensors. And it might be landing on a Philips Hue bridge near you very soon.

Sensify is a wireless network sensing (WNS) technology developed by Ivani that can turn mains-powered Zigbee devices into motion sensors for controlling your lights with just a firmware update — no additional hardware needed. The best part is that it can work on devices already in most homes. “There are tens of millions of devices with the base firmware already out there; we’re just working on the final touches to light up the full experience,” Ivani cofounder Justin McKinney tells The Verge.

An obvious use case for this is a Zigbee-based smart lighting system such as Philips Hue. There’s been speculation that Hue is working on a Zigbee sensing technology since its sister company Wiz debuted a similar tech called SpaceSense in 2022, which uses WNS over Wi-Fi. The well-informed hueblog.com reports that Zigbee wireless network sensing is the technology Hue will most likely use. The Verge reached out to Signify, which owns Hue, but hasn’t yet received a response.

McKinney wouldn’t say which companies are using Ivani’s Sensify, which has been in development since 2016, but he did share that the company is working “with some large household names poised to deploy the technology very soon.” He also said it’s the only company offering this capability over Zigbee networks.

Ivani is a member of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), which runs the Zigbee protocol, but Sensify is a proprietary solution that leverages the Zigbee network. Despite reports indicating this sensing tech is coming to all Zigbee devices, the CSA confirmed to The Verge that this is not a new feature within Zigbee itself.

WNS works by detecting disturbances in radio frequencies and can also be applied to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Thread technologies. McKinney says Sensify requires three or more devices positioned around a detection area to detect motion and occupancy in the space. The tech also allows for precise detection zones based on where the devices are situated. “The devices send messages to each other, look at underlying network diagnostic information, and process it to provide occupancy sensing decisions,” says McKinney.

Image: Ivani

Performance-wise, McKinney says Sensify is “equivalent or superior” to passive infrared sensing (PIR) tech, which is traditionally used for motion sensing. It also doesn’t need line of sight, as PIR does. However, it’s not as precise as technologies like mmWave sensing, which can determine if someone is in a room through as slight a movement as breathing. “The lights will still likely turn off if you’re still, even if you’re in the space,” he says.

The good news is that Sensify can run on Zigbee networks with a range of chipsets working together, meaning it can be deployed as a software update to existing systems. McKinney also confirmed Sensify runs locally on your Zigbee network, there’s no Sensify cloud, and any sensing data is only accessible to the manufacturer deploying the technology.

This video, published by the CSA, illustrates how Ivani’s wireless network sensing works over a Zigbee network.

Motion sensing in the smart home has several use cases, from lighting control and security to energy management and elder care. Two big advantages of WNS here are cost and scale. There’s no need to buy additional hardware to get the capability, and many homes already have devices that can use it.

Ivani is currently the only company with a Zigbee solution, but there are WNS solutions out there that use Wi-Fi. Origin Wireless and its partner company, Nami, were the first to develop Wi-Fi sensing, and they are leading Matter’s efforts around bringing ambient RF sensing technologies to the smart home standard.

Origin’s technology powered Linksys Aware, a feature the router company launched in 2019 that turned its routers into motion sensors, and last year, Threshold launched a smart plug using Origin’s Wi-Fi sensing to allow caregivers to monitor a loved one’s activity remotely.

In 2021, I tested Hex Home, a proof-of-concept security system from Origin that used Wi-Fi sensing instead of motion sensors. But false positives made it virtually unusable. I also tried Wiz’s Wi-Fi-based SpaceSense when it first launched. It was more reliable but still fairly inconsistent. However, according to McKinney, advances in machine learning and AI have brought significant improvements to WNS technology.

He says Ivani’s Sensify tech is ready for deployment over Zigbee, and they’re just waiting for their partners to fine-tune how best to “introduce the feature within their product lines.” He expects they will update existing products in the next few months. “We have the pleasure of experiencing our partner’s products and their beta tests in our homes, and it really is the promise of what home automation was supposed to be.”

There have been a lot of promises around home automation over the years, with very few being fulfilled. But the idea of, say, every Philips Hue light bulb in your home turning into a motion sensor overnight, making it simple to automate control of your lights without sticking white plastic sensors everywhere, is a fairly exciting one.

Will the last device leaving the Nest app please turn out the lights? The day finally arrived; Google has announced it’s transitioning the Nest Protect smoke and CO alarm to the Google Home app. This means you’ll be able to get alerts and notifications for your alarm directly through Google Home, as well as hush alarms, according to a blog post from Google. This means you no longer need the Nest app for any device, but you can still use it — for now, at least.

The Nest Protect was the last device that could only be accessed and controlled from the Nest app, following Google’s efforts over the last couple of years to fully port its Nest cameras and other devices to the Home app. With this move, Google will finally be able to sunset the Nest app, although the company has said it will keep it in maintenance mode indefinitely.

Image: Google Home

The new function for the Nest Protect is coming to Google Home users in Public Preview on Android this week and to iOS “soon.” According to Google, it will enable the following features:

Receive emergency and heads-up notifications for smoke and carbon monoxide

Get critical status alerts like battery health or device issues

View when alarms were last tested and run a system-wide safety checkup.

Create a schedule for automatic sound check testing when you’re away from your home

Modify your configuration: change system-wide and alarm-specific settings

View your camera live feeds directly from the emergency alarm card

E911 calling for Nest Aware subscribers - If you are a Nest Aware subscriber in the US, you can use the Google Home app to quickly contact an emergency call center close to your home, even if you’re not home.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Alongside the Nest updates, the Google Home app is also getting expanded support for smart locks connected via Matter, adding the ability to set passcodes, among other features. The lock updates are rolling out through the app’s “Public Preview” feature on Android, with iOS support coming in early 2025.

Image: Google Home

This will allow more manufacturers’ locks to work with Google Home and bring more functions to the app, including passcode management and automatic locking. Google says that not all of the features will work with all Matter locks; it depends on the lock manufacturer. Here’s a rundown of what will be added:

Passcode Management: You’ll be able to manage who has access to your home by sharing and editing passcodes with ease to household members and guests.

One-tap entry: You can enable one-tap entry instead of typing in your passcode and you can lock/unlock your door remotely from the Home app with just a tap of a button.

Automatic locking: Choose how long your lock should wait before automatically re-locking.

Vacation Mode: This mode locks the keypad so it can’t be unlocked from the outside using the touchpad.

One-touch locking: Lock the door using the touchpad or button on the lock.

Push notifications for lock events

CES saw wild innovations from Roborock and Dreame and helpful upgrades from the rest of the pack, all of which are set to make 2025 a banner year for those who’d rather leave the cleaning to the robots.

Read the full story at The Verge.

I’ll see your arm and raise you an arm and two legs. It was the battle of the bots on the CES show floor as robot vacuum manufacturers Dreame and Roborock each added limbs to their rival robovacs.

Dreame launched its X50 Ultra at the show earlier this week, debuting the first robovac that can use its legs to navigate steps and room transitions up to 6cm high. But elsewhere at the show, competitor Roborock was showing off its latest flagship, the Saros Z70, which has an arm that can pick up items like socks.

Not to be outdone, Dreame then showed off a soon-to-be-released model at its CES booth, combining those two step-climbing legs with a robotic arm of its own.

Dreame’s model has a chunkier-looking arm than the Roborock’s, and it says it can pick up items up to 500 grams, whereas Roborock’s can only tackle items up to 300 grams. Dreame says its arm can pick up sneakers as large as men’s size 42 (a size 9 in the US) and take them to a designated spot in your home. The concept could apply to small toys and other items, and you’ll be able to designate specific areas for the robot to take certain items, such as toys to the playroom and shoes to the front door.

However, I didn’t see the robot picking up a sneaker — or anything at all — apparently, the infamous CES show floor Wi-Fi couldn't hack it. Instead, they showed the robust-looking arm moving up, down, and around while the robot lifted itself up on its two small legs. It looked like a tiny horse.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Another interesting invention is a separate toolbox with various brushes that Dreame says the arm can connect to, enabling it to reach into corners and tight spaces where the bot itself cannot go and sweep out the dirt and dust. They also had a new base station that dispenses multiple mopping pads. This allows the robot to choose different pads for different jobs around your home — one for the kitchen another for the bathroom — to help avoid cross-contamination around your home.

Dreame’s Longdong Chen told The Verge that the step-climbing, tool-using, arm-touting bot should be available later this year. A price hasn’t been announced, but it’s a safe bet that it’ll cost an arm and a leg.

One of the key changes Matter is bringing to the smart home is a standardized way to enable local control of smart devices. This means your light bulb doesn’t have to talk to the cloud when you ask your voice assistant to turn it off. While some smart home ecosystems already offer local control, Matter should make implementing it easier for every smart home platform.

This week, Google announced it has added full local control of Matter devices to its Google Home hubs by integrating Home Runtime. Now, Google Nest hubs and speakers, Chromecasts, Google TV devices on Android 14, and some LG TVs can connect to and control Matter devices locally.

“This means when a user who has a hub for Google Home device (at home) is viewing or controlling their Matter devices (at home), they can do so with higher reliability, privacy, and lower latency,” Jeannie Zhang, product manager for Google Home, told The Verge.

This is a significant change for the platform, which has historically relied on cloud connectivity for device control. Now, if the internet is down and you ask Google Assistant to turn on the lights, it should actually be able to follow through.

Google also shared details on its recent efforts to help developers make more products that work with Matter. These include working with the Connectivity Standards Alliance to make certifying Matter devices easier and partnering with MediaTek to build a new chip that includes Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, and Thread. This should make it “easier and more affordable for device OEMs to build Thread into all their new products,” Google Home senior engineering director Matt Van Der Staay writes.

Finally, Google is opening its Home APIs to all developers. This allows developers to integrate Google Home devices and automations into their own apps, allowing them to focus their resources on building devices rather than integrations.

Google announced the Home APIs at I/O, but they weren’t available to all developers. The program had been in an early access phase with companies such as Eve, Nanoleaf, LG, ADT, Cync, Yale, and Aqara. Now, any company can access the Android version of the Home APIs in public developer beta, with the iOS version coming soon. Google says the Home APIs consist of:

Device and Structure APIs: With one single integration, get access to over 600M devices already connected to Google Home and a single unified interface to manage and control both cloud-connected and Matter devices across Google Home, enabling local control, broad device reach, and support for Matter custom clusters.

Commissioning API: Simplifies device set up with Fast Pair on 3 billion Android devices, commission Matter devices directly within your app, enabling seamless onboarding, voice control via Google Assistant, and compatibility with the Google Home ecosystem.

Automation API: Empower your users with all the tools needed to create and manage home automations directly in your app, leveraging extensive signals, commands, and Google specific AI-driven capabilities for personalized and intelligent home experiences.

Essentially, all of this allows developers to use the Google Home platform to power their app’s automations and integrations with other devices. While this can significantly speed up development — it helped Eve finally launch an app for Android — the downside is if Google ever pulled the API access (as it did when it shut down its Works with Nest program), developers would be left high and dry.

However, despite its history here, the likelihood of that happening seems slim. From what I’ve seen, the company does seem to be taking a more thoughtful, thorough approach to the smart home.

Home appliance manufacturer Bosch is showing off its first Matter-enabled appliance on the show floor at CES this week. The 100 Series French Door Bottom Mount Refrigerator launched in November and should be available to buy in the US this spring.

The fridge retails for $2,500 and has a chip on board that supports Matter. A firmware update to the smart home standard will come this summer, says Eelco Lammertink of BSH, which owns Bosch, Siemens, Thermador, and Gaggenau.

The 100 Series is the sister product to the Matter-enabled Siemens XXL fridge I spotted at IFA in Berlin last November. That built-in model will come to the European market on a similar timeline. Lammertink tells me BSH plans to bring Matter to all of its appliances across its Bosch, Siemens, and Thermador lines, starting with refrigerators this year, one more appliance category next year, and three in 2026.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

The 100 Series will support Matter 1.3, allowing you to control the temperature remotely and receive notifications from the fridge on your smart home platform of choice. That way, a smart speaker can announce when the door has been left open.

While many smart fridges already have these features, with Matter, the connection between the appliance and the ecosystem becomes local — making it faster and more secure. Currently, only Samsung SmartThings and Home Assistant support appliances in Matter, but Lammertink tells me that Amazon will support them this year. There is no word on Google Home or Apple Home yet.

Lammertink says the plan is to bring energy reporting and energy management capabilities to the fridge. This would enable it to be part of a Matter-enabled whole home energy management system. Sadly, he said they won’t be updating existing appliances to Matter (bad news for my Thermador range and dishwasher). “The challenges are too big,” he said. “We just can’t risk bricking your fridge.”

What if your cat tower could weigh your furry friend, monitor its health, and help keep their pesky dander spores out of your air? That’s the idea behind LG’s new AeroCatTower, an air purifier with a cat-friendly dome-shaped seat on top for your feline to curl up in.

The company showcased the gadget at its CES 2025 booth this week, complete with some rather creepy-looking fake cats.

The tower also features a heater to keep your kitty cozy, and the second platform can be used to help senior cats get up to the platform or for a second pet. The air purifier can adjust to a lower flow when there’s a feline on board — so as not to disturb — then ramp up when they leave to help clear the air.

A built-in scale will keep track of their weight using the LG ThinQ app, and you can also see how long your friend has been sleeping... so you can seriously sleep-shame them. Lazy sods.

As with virtually everything being shown at LG’s booth at CES this year, there is no pricing or release date.

Most robot vacuum mops can tackle mopping your floors and maybe scrub up a dried-on stain, but let them trundle through a puddle of spilled milk or juice, and they’re likely to smear the liquid around. If they do suck any up, it could seriously damage the robot’s internals — robot vacuums are not wet / dry vacs.

Robot vacuum manufacturer Eureka claims to have solved this problem with its new J15 Max Ultra ($1,299). According to the company, this robot vacuum and mop, debuting at CES 2025, can accurately spot liquids and automatically rotate its body to tackle wet spills with its mopping pads.

“The J15 Max Ultra adds an infrared vision system to the robot vac, so it can detect the 3D structure of anything in front of it no matter what the lighting is,” Yuan Ruan, PR manager of Midea Group, which owns Eureka, told The Verge in an interview. This allows it to spot and react to liquid spills, both clear and colored. In addition to mopping first, it also raises its roller brush to avoid sucking any liquid into the bin.

While most people aren’t likely to leave wet puddles on their floors — grabbing some paper towel to soak it up only takes a few seconds — it’s feasible that a pet might leave a wet mess while you’re not home. This type of advancement in the capabilities of a robot vacuum to react to what it’s cleaning and adjust appropriately is encouraging.

Over the past few years, high-end robot vacuums have gotten smarter about identifying and reacting to specific objects — such as cables, solid pet waste, and socks — using cameras and computer vision.

Models from companies like iRobot and Roborock can determine what to do based on the type of object they spot. So, rather than simply avoid an object, they will adapt how they clean if they spot certain items. For example, if it’s a pet bowl or kitty litter tray, get close and increase the suction; if it’s a Christmas tree or potted plant, approach with care.

Image: Eureka

Eureka’s new liquid spotting ability builds on this type of intelligence. Eventually, we’ll get to the point where robot vacuums can accurately identify most items in our homes and clean them similar to how we would.

Eureka’s smarts are powered by its new IntelliView AI 2.0 technology, which adds IR vision to the robot’s lidar navigation system and uses computer vision to help it decide how to clean what it sees or if it should avoid it.

Image: Eureka

The Eureka J15 Max Ultra is an upgrade to the J15 Pro Ultra ($999.99), which can identify colored liquids but not clear or white ones. The Max also features a new extendable side brush that can reach out into corners (a feature first seen in the Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra). It also adds increased suction power — up to 22,000Pa from 16,500Pa — increased battery capacity, and a threshold crossing height of up to 40mm.

Both models feature Eureka’s FlexiRazor tech that uses razors inside the robot’s brush system to cut out tangles and dual spinning mop pads that can extend into corners and edges and light up when they detect carpet. The J15 line also has auto-empty base stations that can refill the mopping tank and wash and dry the robot’s mop pads with hot water and air.

The company also introduced the more affordable J15 Ultra to its lineup at CES. The $799 model has most of the same features as the $1,000 J15 Pro Ultra, including the ability to detect colored liquids, but with an increased 19,000Pa of suction power. It will be available in March 2025. The J15 Max Ultra will be available in June 2025.