ZOE, the new contender on the smart home market

Germany-based start-up Protonet is offering an alternative home communications system that isn’t connected to the cloud — ZOE.

The smart home hub is currently part of an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign which has so far landed over 950 supporters who have raised over US$250,000, while 2500 devices have been sold in just three weeks.

Starting at around $199 for pre-orders, due for delivery at the end of 2016, the device is controlled by voice commands and can learn the behavioural patterns of its owners to coordinate their smart devices.

“She understands 1500 voice commands and her vocabulary grows and so does the syntax recognition of new sentences with every software update,” the company said in a press release. “Protonet ZOE can wake the inhabitants on a beautiful Sunday morning with music, raise the blinds and turn on the coffee machine, amongst other things.”

The smart home hub also offers compatibility with many of the leading smart home devices on the market (via Bluetooth, W-Lan, and Z-Wave protocols), as well as Art Covers. This is so the product can be incorporated into a room’s design, rather than become just another plastic hardware box to be hidden from sight.

A series of Drop speakers can also be placed around the home in order to receive spoken commands in other rooms and link to the hub.

The company said ZOE can promise consumers voice-activated control and increased data security as it won’t send commands or data outside the home to be stored, analysed or monetised. ZOE stores the data on her own encrypted 2 GB memory, which makes her independent of external cloud services.

The smart home product builds on open source and can be operated by people who do not have IT skills, according to Protonet. A constant connection to the internet is also not necessary.

Protonet was founded in 2012 by Ali Jelveh and Christopher Blum. In 2014, the company was announced as the crowdfunding World Champion by Seedmatch, with an investment of €3 million for its decentralised cloud system SOUL, and was later elected as the 2014 start-up of the year.

Images courtesy of Protonet.