GoKawiilis a senior reviewer with over twenty years of experience. She covers smart home, IoT, and connected tech, and has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
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Ugreen, known for its phone power banks, chargers, and NAS storage solutions, is moving into the smart home — in a big way. This week at the IFA tech show, the company launched its HomeAgent smart home platform that combines security camera storage, on-device AI, and smart home control in one system, managed by a voice assistant called Uliya, with the promise that everything runs locally.
At the core of Ugreen’s HomeAgent system is a hub that acts as the brain of your smart home, running a local-first AI (with some caveats) that you can interact with using natural language via Uliya. There are three hub configurations to choose from, each of which stores all data locally and processes video footage on-device, keeping it local and private and without monthly subscription fees. Albeit likely at a higher upfront cost.
Ugreen’s MasterAgent MA100 hub is a NAS and smart home hub in one. Powered by a Nvidia Jetson Thor T5000 platform, it has up to 2,070 TFLOPS of AI performance. It will probably cost a fortune.
The big pitch is that your data never needs to leave your home, addressing two key smart-home concerns: privacy and recurring subscriptions. Ugreen says its powerful AI runs on the hub, providing features like cross-camera tracking, smart alerts for people, vehicles, pets, and packages, and live status questions such as “where is my pet now?”
There’s also AI-powered video search and text descriptions of events, along with natural language voice control of smart home devices and automations. Along with local storage of your camera footage, the system can store personal files, including music, movies, and photos, just like a NAS.
All this comes without monthly storage fees for video footage that are common with popular cloud-based solutions, such as Amazon’s Ring and Alexa and Google’s Nest cameras and Gemini for Home.
The HomeAgent HA100 will launch with early bird pricing of $899 which increases to $2999 of the HA100 Pro, and a whopping $9999 for the Nvidia-powered MasterAgent MA100 model. The systems will launch on Kickstarter in October, after which Ugreen suggests that pricing will roughly double.
The SynCare Indoor Cam ID500 Pro The battery-powered SynCare Cam OD800 Pro. Both cameras record footage locally to the HomeAgent hub. The Ugreen app for HomeAgent
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