While Alexa’s charm and capabilities may light up your room, she can’t actually illuminate a space. For all the good things that come with the Amazon Echo, actual light isn’t one of them (and no, the blue ring that is illuminated when you say “Alexa” doesn’t count). But now, there’s a smart device maker that wants to change all that. Meet the Covi, a speech-enabled light that promises to automate your home by working with Alexa right out of the box. Combining designer lighting with AI capacities, Covi may just be the new light of your life.
The Covi comes from smart home company Senic, who we first told you about two years ago when it debuted its initial product, the Nuimo. That little device worked as a universal remote of sorts, controlling your music, lighting, and more. But now, Senic is back with its latest offering, and it promises to be better than what came before.
“One of the things that sets us at Senic apart is that after crowdfunding our first product Nuimo, we’ve now shipped several thousand devices,” company CEO and co-founder Tobias Eichenwald told Digital Trends. “We’ve talked to hundreds of our users and visited many of them at home and learned a lot in the process. These learnings directly flowed into the development of COVI.”
While other smart home hubs seem to privilege function over form, the Covi is first and foremost, a piece of furniture (it would look great in your smart apartment!). Promising to blend into your home, no matter the decor, this stylish piece is actually based on the design of a traditional kerosene lamp. It features a little knob on the base which would’ve previously been used to regulate the flow of oil. But today, it’s been modernized into a dimming switch that allows you to control how warm or cool the white LED light of the Covi glows.
But the tech behind the Covi is pretty impressive, too. Both the Senic team and outside developers contributed to the platform to create the glowing hub’s integrations. That means that installers and integrators interested in learning more about home automation can easily work with Covi too, as it’s an open-source platform.
“Developers will have the option to create their own integrations and make it possible to integrate into other systems,” Eichenwald told us. “Essentially we feel it should be up to the users what devices and integrations they use – or what platform it runs on, we don’t feel they should be locked into a platform. Most other devices and platforms to not openly offer or encourage this, but we believe it’s the future.”
You can preorder a Covi from Kickstarter now for about $110 (99€), with an estimated delivery date of March 2018.
