Amazon Echo is the connected speaker with voice commands

Voice assistants have started to gain traction thanks to the success of products like Google Now and Siri, but now Amazon is joining the fray with a completely different approach of its own, the Amazon Echo.

Instead of being locked to your mobile device, Echo is a standalone speaker that’s meant to give you easy access to information such as the news and weather while at home (indeed, it needs to be plugged in to an outlet). It can also set alarms and timers, make lists or answer questions using sources like Wikipedia.

It can also play audio from various sources, including Amazon Prime, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn. Alternatively, you can use Bluetooth to stream audio from your devices, like any other wireless speaker.

The assistant is a multi-directional listening post with seven microphones arranged in a circular array. Likewise, it has 360 degree speakers to play back audio clearly to wherever you’re standing.

Amazon will be releasing Fire OS and Android companion apps to help manage your information and view your lists, while desktop and iOS users can user access the system via their browsers.

People are accustomed to using voice control on their phones and in their cars, but homes are one area where the technology has hardly made a dent. It’s not hard to imagine how a voice assistant could come in handy at home: you could pull up recipes while cooking, check the weather while getting dressed or get definitions while reading a book. Whether Echo actually performs well, however, remains to be seen.

The device will go on sale for  $199, but for a limited time, Prime members can purchase theirs for $99. You’ll probably have to wait, however; sales are currently invite-only. 

Google's Nest Will Track You Closely To Make Its Thermostat More Efficient

Nest’s thermostat will be paying a little closer attention to you.
Nest calls its thermostat the “Learning Thermostat,” because its software algorithms are designed to learn your schedule and automatically set your temperature for maximum comfort and efficiency. Its 4.3 software update it announced today is going to make the thermostat learn your schedule a whole lot better.

Called the “Enhanced Auto Schedule,” the update will incorporate more information about user patterns and occupancy information into the algorithm. As an example, the thermostat will be able to figure out when your schedule shifts to when your kids go back to school. The updated thermostat software will more quickly incorporate that information into the algorithm.

“The main improvements in our algorithm is the way it compiles and analyzes additional information from the home,” said Maxime Veron, head of product marketing at Nest, in a phone call. “In order to make the home save more energy and keep it comfortable, we are putting much more weight [in the algorithm] to occupancy in the home. We are learning the schedule better based on understanding occupancy better. This enables the thermostat to save more energy.”


In Nest’s white paper on the updated auto-schedule feature, it says: “Every interaction is treated as a way for the user to communicate with the device about his or her preferences for a particular temperature at a particular time and day of the week. In addition to considering active interactions, we also consider lack of interactions (indicating satisfaction with the current temperature), as well as the room temperature and whether the user is home or away. This provides a more holistic view of user preference than was considered previously.”

Based on simulation testing, Nest claims that this updated feature will be able to save 23.1 percent in cooling and 19.5 percent in heating for users. That adds 6.1 percent for cooling and 5.6 percent for heating over its old algorithm. But this is only in simulation testing. The tricky part is actually seeing these kinds of savings consistently.

 

A big problem for Nest and all the other so-called smart thermostats on the market is demonstrating energy savings. Yes, they will probably save you some energy, but how much varies widely. There are too many variables involved and no standardized method of evaluating energy savings to give a reliable figure. Geographical location, the type of house and how users behave all factor into how much energy these devices are actually able to save.

Nest recently got in a spat with cloud-based energy management software maker EcoFactor about which company can save consumers more energy. EcoFactor came out in October brandishing third-party test results claiming that they showed its software algorithms were more effective than Nest’s in saving energy. The study showed, for example, that thermostats using EcoFactor’s software reduced peak load by 2.7 kW per thermostat. That’s twice the amount Nest claimed at 1.18 kW per device. Nest shot back in a blog post on its website saying that the comparisons were unfair and that EcoFactor was comparing completely different timeframes.

 

“With a lot of these companies putting in hardware and software into the home like Nest or Honeywell’s Lyric thermostat or whatever, energy savings depend on many variables,” said Neil Strother, principal research analyst at Navigant Research. “It’s hard to get apples-to-apples comparisons.”

One thing is for sure, though, making sure Nest’s algorithms keep better tabs of its users certainly won’t get in the way of cutting down on energy.

“We are learning more about the home,” said Veron. “We can carve out more savings based on that.”

Now open hotel rooms with just your smartphone

Starting this week, you can use a smartphone app to open your room at some Aloft, Element and W hotels. Over the next few months, Starwood (which owns those three chains) will upgrade 150 of its hotels to allow keyless, smartphone entry to some 30,000 rooms worldwide. Hilton, which is a much larger hotel chain, plans to roll out a similar system next year. Keyless entry via smartphone is obviously more convenient than using a magnetic swipe card (which is easily lost or demagnetized), and probably a lot more secure, too, considering how easy it was to hack conventional Onity locks. Did I mention that keyless entry also means you can skip the check-in desk and go straight to your room, too?

  

Keyless hotel room entry works like this. You enroll your phone by installing an app. On the day of your stay at the hotel, a “key” (some kind of encrypted code) is sent to your phone via a push notification, along with a message telling you which room number you’ll be staying in. Then, you just hold your phone near your hotel room door, and voila — it unlocks. In this case, the app is Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) — a loyalty scheme for its Aloft, Element, and W hotel chains.

Starwood will have to roll out brand new locks that support this new form of keyless entry — but beyond the fact that Bluetooth is used between the phone and lock, we know very few technical details. In an interview with the BBC, the company that made the new locks — HID Global — says it uses its own AES encryption method, with a “rotating key.” This could imply that the locks themselves are not networked — i.e. they’re standalone devices — and that they just rotate through a series of unlock codes. 

This is probably safer than the Onity magnetic key card locks — which could be hacked very simply with an Arduino — but if anyone reverse-engineers the encryption algorithm then this new keyless scheme might not be much safer. (And unlocking millions of hotel rooms with a smartphone is an even lower barrier to entry than using an Arduino!) A much better alternative would be connecting each room lock to a central computer — so that a smarter encryption/unlocking method could be used — but I’m guessing the cost of running new cabling/routers for tens of thousands of hotel rooms was prohibitive. 

Security concerns aside, keyless entry with a smartphone is so, so superior to magnetic swipe cards. First, it’s much harder to lose a smartphone. Second, your smartphone can’t be demagnetized by other things in your pocket. Third, you can skip check-in completely and go straight to your hotel room — and you can skip the check-out, too. The only problem I can see is if your smartphone runs out of battery — and it also isn’t clear how you would handle multiple people sharing the same room (does everyone get the key sent to their phone?) I assume there is some kind of fall-back solution available in such situations — Bluetooth-enabled cards that can be handed out by the front desk, or something along those lines.

Starting Wednesday, November 5, 10 Starwood hotels will be enabled for keyless entry via the SPG app. The plan is to have 30,000 rooms enabled in 150 Aloft, Element, and W hotels by “early 2015.” Next year, Hilton is expected to begin the roll-out of a similar system, with somewhere in the region of 4,000 hotels — 600,000 rooms — being enabled for keyless entry by the end of 2016.