Jordan O'BrienSmart home manufacturers are spending a lot of time at CES 2018 talking up their integration with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. Netatmo is already way ahead of its competitors, however, meaning it’s spending the show discussing its new integration with Facebook Messenger.
Facebook has been trying to get companies to use its Bot platform, which allows users to communicate with brands through the Messenger platform. While retailers have been keen to use the service, with Burger King and Domino’s Pizza amongst early adopters, smart home manufacturers have thus far largely snubbed the service. Netatmo wants to give its users as many control options as possible, however.
Dubbed Netatmo Smart Home Bot, this personal assistant is simply controlled through text messages on Facebook Messenger. Using its Natural Language Processing algorithms, the Netatmo Smart Home Bot understands the users’ demands, responds to their requests and controls each Netatmo connected object in the home. In this way, users can manage all their Netatmo and ‘with Netatmo’ products through text, even when they are not at home.
With the Netatmo Smart Home Bot, the user can simply send a message to find out who is at home (‘Who is at home?’), what the weather is (‘What is the current weather like?’) and even control actions like turning on the lights (‘Turn on the light’) or changing the temperature (‘Set the bedroom temperature to 23 °C’).
The Netatmo Smart Home Bot is free and the beta version is already available in English. Other languages are set to follow in 2018.