One tech product making its debut at CES this week is aimed at a global audience with potentially billions of customers. It’s a product that seeks to address the frustrations of internet-connected consumers who face a growing, often-confusing pile of remote controls throughout their home. ControlAny, a passionate team of IoT and smart home product engineers spent the last three years developing a product that, when seen “in action”, hopes to make a convincing argument that we should take our TV channel changers and all other remote control devices in our home and toss them in the trash.
Why? So BEAK, as a truly universal remote, can control all our connected appliances and take over a job that was previously managed by many different remotes.
Through BEAK’s powerful hub and scalable app, you can control thousands of remote-controlled appliances, light bulbs, locks, wireless cameras, video-enabled doorbells, security systems, and even internet-connected devices that feed your dog on a precise schedule when you can’t be there to feed Fido yourself. To take on these many household tasks with one remote, BEAK supports a huge range of wireless protocols, including Z-Wave, Zigbee, BLE, Bluetooth, and, of course, Wi-Fi. To control the signals generated by traditional remotes, BEAK also has an IR transceiver to control IR devices, as well as temperature, humidity, ambient light and proximity sensors.
One of BEAK’s signature features is that it’s third party device friendly. It supports popular devices such as the Philips Hue, SmartThings, Nest, Wink, Sonos, and a growing number of third party platforms. BEAK even supports Amazon Echo, allowing homeowners to turn off their lights or turn on romantic music (and possibly, by no coincidence, their spouse as well) with voice commands so they don’t have to use the smart phone app exclusively.
With its customizable, scalable platform and its AI-powered engine, BEAK will learn from your behavior and, over time, launch a synchronized ballet of interconnected lighting, music, and security devices – all of it happens after BEAK’s AI learns how you interact with connected devices throughout your home. The result – you will lead an increasingly smart life in your smart home.
For BEAK’s elegant yet scalable design, ControlAny received the CES 2018 Innovation award in the smart home category.
While company managers are honored to pick up the award, along with other breakout startups, when CES 2018 starts next Tuesday, a greater measure of their success will be the number of homeowners who choose BEAK as their preferred smart home hub and Universal remote control.
“Over the last six months, we’ve seen or heard about some amazing new products entering the smart home marketplace,” said ControlAny co-founder, Pramod Sinha. “One of the most interesting products is a ‘smart toilet’ that analyzes your biochemistry and sends you a monthly medical report. If it detects any potentially unhealthy anomalies, it sends a report to your doctor by email. Fascinating! Of course, whoever buys a smart toilet will need a hub and a smart remote controller. That’s where we step in (and possibly sit down, if we buy the toilet ourselves)”.
While Sinha and his co-founders constantly track – sometimes obsessively – trends in IoT technology and shopping trends among smart homeowners, they were startled nonetheless by a recent Forrester Research prediction that, within six years, there will be 225 million smart devices installed in U.S. households.
The BEAK Smart Hub and Universal Remote Control will be sold at a discount through Indiegogo, where a campaign is underway through the end of January. Then BEAK will be sold through the company’s website for a per unit price of $190.
