Voice-Controlled Home

The annual International Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas is always filled with astonishing prototypes for products that don’t exist and may never exist, although you hope they will someday. Just one such product is ivee. Ivee does already exist as a talking alarm clock. You say “Hello ivee,” and it responds with a robotic “Hello.” Then you tell it what time to wake you up. I know, you can do this with Siri on your iPhone. But here is where it get more intriguing. Ivee is demonstrating a new model, the Sleek, at this year’s show. Sleek connects to a Wi-Fi network, with the idea that the device can serve as a voice control for all the Wi-Fi-connected devices in your house that don’t have their own voice-recognition software. In a demonstration video, a user talks to ivee to control a thermostat and ask a Roomba robotic vacuum to clean up a mess. The Wi-Fi allows the Sleek to get simple information from the Web. For instance, you can ask for the weather in a distant city and ivee answers. But in the booth itself, things were a little more complicated. Jonathon Nostrant, the company’s founder, had connected an ivee Sleek to a Nest thermostat and a Belkin smart plug, which can turn lamps on and off. But neither of these companies have shared their application programming interfaces, or APIs, with ivee, so Mr. Nostrant had a programmer build a work-around. It was glitchy, working sometimes but not others. Mr. Nostrant said that ivee did ask for cooperation from these companies, but was initially rebuffed. He said that working together would make sense for everyone involved. But for this version of the connected home to work, ivee still has to work out some more business connections.