The Essential Home is an Amazon Echo rival with its own OS
It's smart in looks and smart in smarts...
Smart personal assistant speakers are just like London buses – you wait years for one, then four turn up at once.
With Amazon Echo and Google Home already controlling light bulbs in living rooms around the world and Apple expected to launch a Siri speaker next week, you might not think there’s room for another. But Essential, the tech company launched by Android founder Andy Rubin, clearly disagrees, because it’s launching the Essential Home into that crowded marketplace.
So what is it? And should you be excited?
A digital orchestra conductor
Like an Amazon Echo or Google Home, the Essential Home will bring together many of the other smart products you have in your house. Essential describes it as being "an orchestra conductor for your digital instruments – something that can get them to start to work together in new, exciting ways", which is a long-winded way of saying that it’ll act as a smart hub.
Admittedly, Essential claims it’ll go further than its rivals on this front, but without any specifics as to how it’ll do that. At this stage there’s no actual detail as to which platforms it’ll work with either.
Essential does provide plenty of examples of the kind of things it’ll be able to do, though. So, for instance, it’ll be able to "notify you when you need to leave early to make an important meeting, or even if you’re about to forget that special anniversary".
It’ll also be able to answer questions, turn the lights off and play music. And while they’re the kind of things that Amazon and Google’s devices can also do, the Essential Home will supposedly go further, for instance turning your music volume down when you start a conversation in the same room.
As far as the device itself goes, we don’t yet have solid specs, but from what we’ve seen of it it’ll have a big, clear display – something that’s lacking on its rivals – for displaying contextual info and results. You’ll be able to tap to wake it up, or even just glance in its direction – and if it’s got something useful to tell or show you, it’ll subtly glow.
Ambient vibes
The brains of the Essential Home will be provided by Essential’s own Ambient OS, and this is already available for developers to start playing around with. Essential says that the goal of Ambient OS is to “activate” your home, and that "with Ambient OS, your home is the computer. Ambient OS is aware of the physical layout of your home, the people that live in it, services relevant to both your home and the people within, and devices."
All of which sounds great in theory, so we’re intrigued to see whether the reality is quite so impressive.
Finally, Essential has also heavily pushed Ambient OS’ privacy credentials; in a possible dig at Amazon Echo, which constantly records everything you say within earshot, Essential says "the home is your own space where you should be able to say what you want, without having to worry about your privacy."
In practice, Essential says that where possible the Home will talk to other devices locally rather than via the cloud, which will limit the number of times it’ll need to share your data over the web. Again, this is very different from the way in which its rivals work.
And that’s all we know about it so far – no release date, no price, no hard specs. But we have seen enough to be mildly excited about it, and as soon as we have more info we’ll be sure to share it.
Marc McLaren
Contributor 
