Voice-assistants are great — or at least they are in theory. Sometimes, they’re not so great at listening, or worse, sometimes they listen too much. Then there’s one of my biggest pet peeves: the not-so-inconspicuous hardware.
With a hub prototype called “Calm,” Mui wants to make your smart home experience more serene by streamlining features through an interactive, minimalist, piece of mountable wood that doesn’t harsh the vibe, aesthetically or otherwise.
Calm, which can be fixed on a wall or placed on a shelf, has several capabilities, including the ability, when paired to your smart speaker, to set timers through voice commands (i.e. “Alexa, tell Mui to set a timer). It can also turn your lights off or on, set their brightness, and If yelling at your smart speaker feels too brash, Calm even even allows you to write commands with a smart pen instead of screaming into the void.
According to Mui, Calm works with any device that uses Matter — a new platform aimed at unifying smart home devices. As far as pricing and availability goes, it’s unclear where or when you might be able to buy Calm.
Wherever that is, don’t expect it to be cheap. A now-expired Kickstarter campaign set a price of more than $500 per unit and Mui suggests a retail price of $999. We’ve reached out to Mui and will update with any further info.