Home Assistant announced today the availability of the Voice Preview Edition, its own design of a living-room-friendly box to offer voice assistance with home automation. Having used it for a few weeks, it seems like a great start, at least for those comfortable with digging into the settings. That's why Home Assistant is calling it a "Preview Edition."
Using its privacy-minded Nabu Casa cloud—or your own capable computer—to handle the processing, the Voice Preview Edition (VPE) ($60/60 euros, available today) has the rough footprint of a modern Apple TV but is thinner. It works similarly to an Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri device, but with a more focused goal. Start with a wake word—the default, and most well-trained version, is "Okay, Nabu," but "Hey, Jarvis" and "Hey, Mycroft" are available. Follow that with a command, typically something that targets a smart home device: "Turn on living room lights," "Set thermostat to 68," "Activate TV time." And then, that thing usually happens.
Home Assistant's Voice Preview Edition, doing what it does best. I had to set a weather service to an alias of "the weather outside" to get that response worked out.
"That thing" is primarily controlling devices, scenes, and automations around your home, set up in Home Assistant. That means you have to have assigned them a name or alias that you can remember. Coming up with naming schemes is something you end up doing in big-tech smart home systems, too, but it's a bit more important with the VPE.
Z-Wave can be a very robust automation network, free from the complications and fragility of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Just how robust, you ask? More than a mile long, under the right circumstances, as hardware soon to hit the market promises.
All claims of radio distances should be taken with amounts of salt unhealthy for consumption. What can be accomplished across an empty field is not the same as what can be done through buildings, interference, and scatter. But Z-Wave Long Range (or Z-Wave LR), operating "in long range mode at full power," can hit 1.5 miles, according to the Z-Wave Alliance, presuming you've got the right star-shaped hub network.
By using a star network topology instead of a more traditional mesh, Z-Wave LR reduces the need for hubs and repeaters, relying instead on a central hub. It can be more reliable for larger commercial spaces, security setups, and bigger homes, and also more power efficient. Devices automatically adjust their signal strength while on Z-Wave networks, extending the battery life of a single coin cell up to 10 years—again, under best-case circumstances. If you're really a glutton for punishment, you can fit up to 4,000 devices on a network running Z-Wave LR, because LR can co-exist on the same network as standard Z-Wave meshes.
Customers order food at a Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurant in Austin, Texas.
Getty Images News/Getty Images
Chipotle's CEO Scott Boatwright said he values the human touch in the chain's assembly lines.
He said automation will likely be contained "in the digital system only."
The chain has been criticized for delivering inconsistent portions to customers.
Chipotle's CEO wants to make sure your burrito is made by hand for as long as possible.
In a podcast interview with Yahoo Finance's "Opening Bid," released on Friday, host Brian Sozzi and CEO Scott Boatwright discussed topics including automation and modernization at Chipotle.
Boatwright, who became the fast food chain's interim CEO in November after his predecessor Brian Niccol left to lead Starbucks, said Chipotle intends to "leverage that automation in the digital system only."
"We still believe the best way to Chipotle is down the line with a team member, highly customized, great variety, big beautiful burritos and bowls down the line," he added.
Boatwright said human interaction is "a core equity of the Chipotle brand."
The brand has dipped a toe into automation: Last July, it announced that it had tapped a robot called "Autocado" to cut, core, and peel avocados, reducing the amount of time needed for the task by half.
It also announced a partnership with Hyphen, a San Jose-based food technology startup. In 2023, the startup told BI that its robotics could crank out up to 180 bowls per hour, six times more than human workers' capabilities.
Criticism over portion sizes
The chain was criticized this year after analysts accused it of skimping on portion sizes.
In June, Fortune reported that Wells Fargo analysts had ordered 75 burrito bowls from eight different locations in New York City and weighed them to check for consistency.
The analysts wrote that among the bowls ordered in-store, the heaviest bowl weighed 47% more than the lightest.
Danilo Gargiulo, a senior analyst of restaurants at AllianceBernstein, told BI in July that using robots in the assembly line would not be a good solution for portion control, as the in-store experience was "part of the secret sauce of Chipotle."
"It's part of the experience of consumers to go there, check out what they have, and ask a person, 'Hey, can I have a little bit more, please?' Or mix up the ingredients as you wish," Gargiulo said.
In the last fiscal quarter, Chipotle reported that its commitment to ensuring consistent portions had taken a toll on its profitability.
"The benefit of last year's menu price increase was more than offset by inflation across several items, most notably avocados and dairy, as well as higher usage as we focused on ensuring consistent and generous portions," CFO Adam Rymer said on the earnings call on October 29.
Boatwright's comments come as restaurants and fast food chains, including Sweetgreen and White Castle, increasingly use robots to handle human tasks. Amid the robotization of the industry, though, some leaders have expressed hesitation about rolling out the red carpet for robots.
When asked by Yahoo Finance about whether he wants to increase automation in Shake Shack, the chain's CEO Danny Meyer said: "Personally, I don't."
"I think when it comes to making the product, there's something about the human touch, smashing that burger, seasoning the burger, flipping the burger, knowing exactly when it is time to come off, where not any two burgers at Shake Shack taste exactly the same," Meyer added in an "Opening Bid" episode on December 4.
Chipotle's shares were trading at $64.60 on Monday. Its stock is up about 41% from the start of the year.
Chipotle representatives didn't respond to a request for comment from BI.
Cyberattacks are on the rise, and the victims are high-profile. According to a KPMG survey, close to half of companies with $1 billion or more in annual revenue recently suffered a security breach. Surprisingly, an overabundance of security tools may be contributing to the problem. In a separate poll, 43% of businesses said their teams […]
"A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind" is a phrase sometimes attributed to Oscar Levant, but I give it to Egon Spengler. I also live that phrase.
My desk is not clean, but I know why everything is on it. It is inefficient if you are not me and are trying to find things or make sense of it. If you know where to look, like I do, however, every piece is doing a particular job.
If you're like me, or know someone like me, you know desk space is at a premium—not to keep it tidy and empty, but to fill it with even more junk. With this in mind, I have compiled some of the items I either own and cherish, or have saved to various online carts and considered many times. These gadgets keep devices powered, items labeled, the office space conveniently automated, and cables always within arm's reach. With all the space and mental stress these gadgets can and do save me, I have so much more room for, say, reading about Oscar Levant and putting empty seltzer cans everywhere.
