Andy Rubin—also known as the father of Android—has
just made his long-awaited, Essential phone official, but alongside the
bezel-less smartphone, Rubin’s Essential venture is also launching a second
device – a smart home speaker that’s going head-to-head with the Amazon Echo
and Google Home, only this one is focused on privacy.
Called the Essential Home, the new
device looks undoubtedly sleek, like a hybrid between the Nest and a Google
Home base with a round display. It looks relatively low-profile, at least when
compared to the Google Home and the Echo (not to mention the upcoming Echo Show
with its massive touchscreen), but we’re a bit disappointed to report that
Rubin and co didn’t showcase the Essential Home in any real-life images.
Instead, what we got are sleek renders.
Anyway, let’s move on to what the Essential Home
does, which is, well, what the other AI-powered home speakers are doing. You
can ask it to jot down a note for you, set reminders, request songs, and all
that. It can also notify you when something is “off” around the house, for
example, if “a light is left on”, Essential says. Although we wouldn’t call
that a good example, per se, it suggests that Essential Home will be able to
work within an ecosystem of smart devices, although which ecosystem remains
unclear at this point. The company says its new device is going to be a
“friendly face for your home that plays well with others,” so we’d imagine it
was meant to integrate well with other smart devices around the house.
Essential Home is Andy Rubin's answer to the Amazon
Echo and Google Home. The Essential Home will run a proprietary operating
system called Ambient OS, which looks similar to a blown-up version of Android
Wear, at least from what we’ve seen on renders. The company says that Ambient
OS was made not with point-to-point interactions with individual devices in
mind, but rather to provide a “set of services and abstractions that enable the
development and execution of applications that run in the context of your
home.“ With Ambient OS, “your home is the computer,” Essential claims. For
example, you can set a timer on the device and have the lights in the living
room flash when it goes off.
One of the key features of Ambient OS is that it
doesn’t rely heavily on the cloud, but rather stores data locally and
communicates with other devices directly. This falls in line with Essential’s
vision to make its smart home assistant as unobtrusive and as secure as
possible.
