How is this getting investor money, and how are consumers seeing this as something worth paying for?
It's just not hard to flip the light switch when you leave the room, and you don't need an all-seeing eye uploading everything that happens in your house to a massive corporation.
I can't believe this is a feature that gets the hype that it does. It's almost as cliche as the example of making a dinner reservation.
There have been significant price drops in small modules for short range, rudimentary V-band (60 GHz) radar to do this sort of thing, which companies can built into their consumer-priced product.
I think some of the better ones are a little bit too power hungry to be entirely wireless on battery, and have a USB-C port in their rear, you're meant to plug it in persistently to a small USB charger and tuck the cable away somewhere.
That's like saying that you don't need a whole PC to do local AI inference because it can run entirely on GPU. The point is that the lights example is just the beginning.
This seems to be the first instance I can think of where a vendor is trying to take a middle road of extracting more value from a camera while also having a more conservative view on privacy. We'll need to see exactly what that means in practice, but I'm glad someone is finally broaching the question.
I really don't see it as a "huge quality of life improvement" to not have to walk to the light switch. I typically combine it with a trip to the kitchen to grab some water or a snack.
You could not pay me to use such a stupid device. No clue why people invest in or purchase such a product.
At $0.11 per kWh if say it's 30W and I leave it on 24x7 for a month it's 22.32 kWh, or about $2.5 of electricity a month. Multiply by three for like $7.5 a month if this was a California electric rate. In the longer run I'd like to have a way to turn it on and off automatically not so much to save money, but to have a way to turn off all the house lights in one toggle in home assistant when going to bed, just for the convenience of it.
I realized I did accidentally almost double my final number, so 500-1000W would be more accurate for the way this condo was built (depending on which extra lamps we are including—does every understair closet light count or just the main rooms, at the low end estimate)
But ya, it's not that hard, the only place I've found a motion sensor to be useful was in the garage.