If you’re finally considering adding a home automation system to your collection of technology, we should let you know that Amazon’s Echo may have some big competition. Protonet has a new product named Zoe, who’s here to up the home automation system ante. This German based company was awarded 2014’s Startup of the Year. They were also able to raise $1 million in the first 89 minutes of their crowdfunding campaign for their private cloud server Maya. So what’s the big deal about Protonet and their new Zoe product? The answer is data privacy.
While Protonet’s Zoe does have ground breaking intelligence and speed, those things can constantly be upgraded among other devices. The real difference is their belief in keeping your private data to yourself. What you may have missed in the small print of certain public cloud providers, is that your data stored in their sever is actually owned by the provider, not the customer.
With public cloud providers, your data is accessible by third parties, it can be more easily hacked or often data can be lost due to an issue with the provider or malicious software. With many of these new smart home gadgets, your data is often open to the entire internet. With Protonet’s private cloud server, all of your data is stored exclusively on your device, so your private data stays private.
Personally, that alone was enough to make me look into Protonet’s Zoe a little further. Here are a few other details about Zoe that might make you consider her for your new smart home system:
- Connectivity – Zoe integrates with the most common smart home devices to manage your complete smart home environment.
- Auto-Learning – Zoe learns the various behavioral patterns of its owners and coordinates the smart home devices accordingly.
- Openness – Zoe is based on Open Source, so you have a whole development community behind its innovative software.
- Advanced Speech Recognition – ZOE can receive a wide range of natural commands due to her unique speech and syntax recognition technology.
- Intelligence – users can teach Protonet ZOE actions that are subject to certain conditions, such as turning on the light after unlocking the front door.
Best yet, Smart-Home Hub does not charge a monthly fee and it functions independently of any cloud, so you don’t have to be connected to the internet or Wi-fi for it to work. It’s also extendable with two USB-ports and supports Bluetooth, Z-Wave and other cloud connected devices.
Zoe has an easy to use mobile interface and understands 1,500 voice-commands. She can learn additional vocabulary with each software update, and all the voice-data is stored into the 2G encrypted local memory.
There’s also the option of adding “Drops”, small mobile devices that can be placed around the house, for voice-command option anywhere in your home.
I don’t mean to objectify Zoe, but she’s a lot better looking than the Echo. With 26 full color LED backlights and interchangeable magnetic faceplates, Zoe looks like she’d be a stylish device for anywhere in your home.
From what we’ve heard, Protonet seems to be the real deal. With companies like BMW, Audi and Airbus using their private cloud servers, and over 2.5 million in sales revenue, Protonet looks like they could be the next big thing. Luckily we will be doing a product review on Zoe shortly, so we can let you know if she’s really as great as she sounds. If you’re already sold, you can go to their INDIEGOGO page and try to get the early bird special before they completely sell out.
