If your home were Middle Earth, the Beak would be the One Ring. Of the many smart home innovations now on the market, this may be one of the more useful. After making its debut at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Beak by ControlAny has made its way to Indiegogo in hopes of raising enough funds to give customers a single device from which to control just about everything in their homes.
Seeking to replace any and all of the other clickers you have lying about your household, the Beak claims to control all your connected appliances to make keeping up with your smart home less of a chore.
The Beak features a hub and scalable app that ought to let you control “thousands of remote-controlled appliances, light bulbs, locks, wireless cameras, video-enabled doorbells, security systems, and even internet-connected devices.” It’s able to do this by supporting a wide range of wireless protocols, including Z-Wave, Zigbee, BLE, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi. In order to control signals generated by standard remotes, the Beak has an IR transceiver that allows it to control IR devices, and also claims to be able to monitor temperature, humidity, ambient light and proximity sensors.
Manufacturer-agnostic, one of the most useful purported features of the Beak is its compatability with a number of different devices. The list already includes Philips Hue, SmartThings, Nest, Wink, and Sonos, and the ControlAny team says that it’s only growing.
While we haven’t tried the Beak out first hand, the team behind the device received the CES 2018 Innovation award in the smart home category, which might make the Beak seem less like a pipe dream. Of course, you should always be wary of products that are seeking funding via websites like Indiegogo or Kickstarter.
As it stands, the Beak Smart Hub and Universal Remote Control is being offered at a discounted price through its Indiegogo campaign, where it has already raised over $40,000. With more than three weeks left, it looks likely that the team will reach its $50,000 goal. An early bird pledge of $130 should get you a Beak in June 2018, although the ControlAny team says that it will soon offer the Beak for $190 on its website, too.
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