Innovation

Presence: knowing who is home, and where

A home control system is only as smart as what it knows about the people in it. We give it the ability to know who is home and which room they are in. All of it is processed locally — no cloud required.

• Device footprint — the ability to recognize each person’s phone, tablet and watch on the network, which shows both presence and location within the home.
• Facial recognition — the ability to recognize members of the household at the cameras as they arrive and leave.
• License plate recognition — the ability to identify vehicles as they enter and leave the property.

A home with a memory

Most systems handle the moment and then forget it. Many alarm panels keep only the last two hundred or so events before the oldest are overwritten. We consolidate the events from every system in the home into one Homebook database, so you can see what happened last Tuesday, not just what is happening now — and can replay a whole day’s activity.

Expected or unexpected

With history, the system learns what normal looks like. Every event is classified as known or unknown, expected or unexpected. A door opening at 3:30 on a school afternoon is routine. The same door at 3:30 in the morning is not, and the house can respond to the difference.

Ask your home

“When did the garage door open?” “When did the kids get home from school?” Most voice assistants cannot answer questions about your own house. We are developing a voice assistant that answers them from Homebook’s data, using custom AI language models, hosted locally. This work is still under development, but we love to demo our working beta release.

Smarter triggers

Accurate presence and a complete event history make the triggers that run your home — scenes, automations and alerts — smarter and more secure.

• A stolen car should not open your garage. Two-factor authentication on the garage door means the opener in the car is not enough on its own.
• Alerts that know who is home. A camera alert can act differently when you are home, when you are away, or when the kids are home alone.
• Awake or asleep. Based on daily patterns and device footprints, the house knows who is awake and who is sleeping, and adjusts its automations and announcements to match.
• Make guests more comfortable. Occupancy routines know when there is a house guest. At night, pathway lighting glows softly between the bedroom, bathroom and kitchen, so guests never have to hunt for a light switch in an unfamiliar house.

Built on Homebook

All of this runs on Homebook, the platform we built to document and run the homes we integrate. It keeps an inventory of every product in the house — with manuals, recalls, firmware updates, warranty coverage and preventive maintenance — and consolidates the data behind everything on this page.

We would rather show you than tell you. We keep working systems in real houses that you can walk through, and we would welcome the chance to demonstrate the difference in person.