The Connected Home just got… more Connected
Tags: Internet of Things, Connected Home, IoT, Smart Home

With the proliferation of new smart home devices being made available to consumers by both global organisations such as Google, Amazon and the likes, as well as focused companies such as Nest Labs Inc, the connected home marketplace is showing no signs of slowing. However, many companies operating in the connected home marketplace face challenges that prevent them from reaping the full rewards of the advancing technologies that enable household devices to communicate with each other.

One of these challenges is that today, and likely for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of electronic household devices are not able to connect to home networks via wireless protocols such as Bluetooth, NFC or even Wi-Fi. Additionally, consumer hesitance to begin the process of transforming their home into an automated, cost-efficient habitat is compounded by the perceived complexity of the set-up process that is required to do so.

Chirp now makes it possible to solve many of these challenges by enabling data transfer, control and automation between the vast majority of household devices that could never be part of a connected home ecosystem and the small amount of devices that can. It further allows devices outside “the home” to interact with those inside it, through media such as TV broadcasts, radio broadcasts, home PCs or even the smartphone. Even the dumbest doorbell, or a greeting card can now interact with the home network.

A Chirp is a sonic barcode. Chirp technology comes as a data-over-audio toolkit which can be embedded into virtually any audio-capable device, enabling it to encode data and content into unique audio streams. Any device with a speaker can transmit a chirp, and most devices with a microphone can decode it and receive whatever is inside. Chirp’s technology provides a bridge, interconnecting generations of technology, old and new, enabling the transmission of data between devices that is just not possible using other methods such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or NFC. Using streams of audio chirps, equipment that was previously isolated can now communicate with the home network. Chirp technology can also be used in conjunction with Bluetooth, NFC or Wi-Fi to provide a more friction-free interaction, pairing process or set up.

The Chirp team have been busy in our lab experimenting with Amazon Echo, the hands-free speaker and member of Amazon’s portfolio of smart home technology products that are powered by Alexa, Amazon’s intelligent voice control service. The Echo was recently described by CNET as the best Smart Home Centrepiece during their review of the Best Smart Home Devices of 2016.

Whilst Echo is able to control smart lights, switches, thermostats and other household devices that are connected to a network, Chirp have now also enabled it to transmit extensive data to offline devices, using only sound. To do this, we embedded our technology into Activision’s Skylanders Imaginators game, allowing players to share characters created in the game to the companion mobile app, bypassing the console altogether. Setting our mobile device to airplane mode before transferring the data, we used Echo and Alexa to send a full Imaginators character with literally millions of different designs, abilities, catchphrases and musical theme combinations, all offline! See this in action:

Whilst Activision chose to work with Chirp technology due to its ability to transfer an entire character’s-worth of data reliably, they also needed a solution that could do so without using Wi-Fi or bluetooth because not all video game consoles are online / bluetooth-enabled, and because a percentage of parents prefer not to connect their kid’s console to the internet for safety reasons, nor their mobile to data via the network.

Chirp technology not only answered the specific requirement of Activision and other companies concerned with preserving privacy and child safety in the home, but also provides a solution to the many companies operating in the connected home marketplace that are looking to enable data transfer, control and automation between the vast majority of household devices that could never be part of a connected home ecosystem.

As Chirp technology does not require devices to go through any prior handshake process before they can exchange data, the setup process is frictionless for the user. However, used in conjunction with existing networking technologies such as Wi-Fi, Chirp can also significantly reduce the number of authentication steps required to connect network-enabled devices, providing a more attractive prospect to the many consumers that are still hesitant to begin their connected home transformation.

Since our Activision, and Alexa, projects, we’ve expanded our reach beyond the consumer and the connected home into the industrial sectors. Our technology has been selected for a number of large-scale smart factory and smart building projects, and even one for an exciting smart city.

Automation and connectivity have been used in industrial environments for decades, for example through machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and remote control and monitoring of remote sites, delivering significant operational and productivity benefits. And in recent years, this has extended to what’s become known as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) thanks to the proliferation of smart devices, low-power embedded chips, and connected sensors in the industrial site, providing unprecedented levels of visibility and control for companies.

However, not all industrial environments are able to reap the full rewards of the IIoT revolution. Older legacy equipment often cannot be networked, and some environments present a range of unique communication and networking challenges, such as regulatory restrictions on the use of radio frequency (RF) networking technologies like WiFi and Bluetooth or restrictions on the installation of cabling due to electromagnetic waves formed during specific manufacturing processes. Companies face the challenge of either leaving the equipment as-is and not enjoying the benefits of connectivity, or incurring cost to upgrade or replace the equipment.

Chirp helps solve these challenges by enabling devices of all kinds, including legacy equipment, to send and receive data using sound. Data-over-audio provides a bridge, interconnecting generations of technology, old and new, enabling the transmission of data between devices not possible using other methods of connectivity. Using streams of audio chirps, equipment that was previously isolated can now communicate with the plant’s network, technicians’ hand-held devices or even other equipment in M2M-style, delivering the operational and productivity benefits of IIoT.

But this subject will be covered separately in more detail in a future blog in a few months, with details about how Chirp solved age-old problems in these sectors where even the global giants in the networking sector have been unable to.

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