is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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Robots are coming, but are we ready for them? All the big consumer tech companies are working on robotic companions for our homes. There’s Amazon’s Astro, Samsung’s Ballie, LG’s AI Agent, and whatever it is that Apple is dreaming up in Cupertino. Clearly, home robotics is approaching a major moment. But what will these robots actually do, and what do we really need them for?
This week on The Vergecast, the cofounder and former CEO of iRobot, Colin Angle (now CEO of robotics startup Familiar Machines & Magic), joins The Verge’s smart home reviewer, Jennifer Pattison Tuohy, to discuss what the ideal home robot is.
Are we close to creating a Rosie the Robot — an all-in-one humanoid robot that can take care of our homes, or should we take an entirely different approach to home robotics? They dive into the advances in technology powering this shift and ponder what purpose robotics in the home should really serve.
Then, Jen takes a journey into smart home history to help us understand its future. Grant Erickson, a former Apple, Nest, and Google engineer and one of the creators of Thread, joins the show to tell the story of the newest smart home protocol.
Now principal and founder of Nuovations, Grant is no longer directly involved in the smart home, but in 2011, he was part of the Nest team led by Tony Faddell and Matt Rogers that set out to build the best possible smart home products, and along the way created Thread.
They explore how Thread was developed to solve the problem of fragmented ecosystems and discuss how it became the foundation of the Matter smart home standard — an unprecedented industry collaboration with a Herculean task — to make the smart home simpler.
To close out the show, Grant sticks around to help answer a Vergecast hotline question (call 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]) about how Matter manages your data.
For more on the topics in this episode, here are some links to dig into: