On this week’s episode of the Smart Home Insider podcast, our guest host Jacob Zuppke joins to discuss integrating pet products into the smart home, as well as more of this week’s news.
Jacob Zuppke is the CEO of Whisker, the company that created the most popular automated litter box, the Litter Robot. With his background in SEO and digital marketing, he became a master of all trades to help lead the smart home brand.
We talk a bit about the new Litter Robot 5 Pro, but we also talk about the larger task of integrating smart pet products into ecosystems and the smart home as a whole. Before we get into that, we first talk about the news.
The episode starts with a quick recap of the Apple experience that took place on March 4th. While nothing terribly smart home-related, there were new Thread radios going into more products thanks to Apple’s N1 chip.
We then discussed yet another rumor that Apple’s smart home display has been officially delayed. As was expected, with the next-generation version of Siri launching later than initially expected, Apple’s new smart home display now looks to debut in the fall.
The Aqara U400 smart lock that we reviewed now supports NFC tap-to-unlock via Samsung Wallet. This isn’t enabled via Aliro yet, but rather a native integration with Samsung SmartThings.
Two new Sonos speakers have leaked ahead of any formal announcement. There is the portable Sonos Play and the microphone-lacking Era 100 SL.
Rumors say they could potentially go up for preorder as soon as March 10th.
Finally, Ikea’s line of Matter-over-Thread smart bulbs are now available in the US. They were previously available in the UK, but now the Kajplats line is available online and in stores in the United States, too, in a variety of styles and sizes.
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