MashBlur

Another day, another smart home system looking to break into the market. This time, a team of ex-ASUS engineers have launched a Kickstarter for SmartAll, an AI butler that connects to smart devices.

The hub, which is on sale at Kickstarter, is a small camera with an LED strip around it. It is able to recognize up to five family members and customize a room to their liking — it is also able to spot intruders and create a “panic mode” where the lights and alarms turn on. Users are able to livestream the camera’s POV from a mobile device and save footage. On top of all the camera capabilities, the hub also understands voice commands, like “turn on the television” or “turn up the heating”.

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Once all the smart devices are connected to the butler, it will begin learning patterns and start to automatically make decisions after seven days. If you boil the kettle at 8.30am each morning or turn off the lights at 11pm everyday, it will do that task for you.

It should be noted that while SmartAll supports over 1,000 devices, including Nest’s thermostat, the iRobot Roomba, and a selection of smart home door locks, it hasn’t launched any other smart home devices.

That might be a bit of a strain when it comes to connecting everything up and ensuring that devices work correctly. For one-function items like a door lock or a kettle that might not be too hard, but for a vacuum things like what rooms to clean and how long to clean may be hard to compute.

SmartAll already has an SDK ready for developers to build on the platform. It plans to add health management and emotion recognition to the hub in future updates, giving you food tips and changing songs to fit your current mood.

On Kickstarter, SmartAll is selling its butler for $199, though it has an early bird still available for the first 500, at $149. One year of cloud recording service costs an additional $100 or $299 with the butler.