How do you solve the problem of growing a popular smart home platform committed to open-source, open-standard ideals into something bigger that stays true to those ideals? You create a foundation. At least, that’s the approach Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen has chosen.
Technology
The little smart home platform that could
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25407150/STK266_Home_Assistant_2_CVirginia.jpg?ssl=1 "The little smart home platform that could")
This week, Home Assistant announced it is now part of the Open Home Foundation. The newly formed non-profit will own and govern all of Home Assistant and its related entities. Its creators and inaugural board members — Schoutsen, Guy Sie, Pascal Vizeli, and J. Nick Koston — all work on Home Assistant, and the foundation has no other members so far.
In a press release, the foundation stated its aim is “to fight against surveillance capitalism, and offer a counterbalance to Big Tech influence, in the smart home — by focusing on privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart home users.”
A community-built, open-source smart home platform, Home Assistant differs from its major “big tech” competitors — such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home, because it offers four things simultaneously: local control of your smart home that can be faster and more reliable than the cloud: authority over and access to all your data; compatibility with almost every connected gadget — regardless of protocol or manufacturer; and the ability to make them work together. While many competitors offer some of these, few offer all.
“I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we’re driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale.”
Home Assistant is known for its unmatched power and flexibility, but so far the platform, which has an estimated one million users, has struggled to reach the mainstream. Home Assistant can have a steep learning curve, especially when compared to the relative simplicity of a platform like Alexa or Apple Home. Onboarding devices can be complicated, the UI has lots of room for improvement, and integrations can be hit or miss.
“Home Assistant is no one’s first smart home platform,” says Schoutsen. “When people outgrow their existing systems and want more advanced control, that’s when they come to Home Assistant.” But he sees that the platform is at a tipping point.
With the arrival of the industry-backed smart home standard Matter (with which Home Assistant is heavily involved), smart home adoption is pushing into the mainstream. Home Assistant wants to stay swimming alongside Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and Google, all of which it’s been competing with in the smart home for roughly a decade now. Home Assistant has never accepted investors, says Schoutsen, and he sees a foundation as the best way to grow.
Schoutsen outlined the platform’s future roadmap at its annual State of the Open Home presentation on Saturday, April 20th. In an interview ahead of the live stream, he told The Verge about some of the bigger changes planned for Home Assistant following this transition:
- The Home Assistant Green smart home hub will be sold on Amazon this year, the first time the organization will sell directly to consumers. A new line of Home Assistant Connect dongles for Thread / Zigbee and Z-Wave will follow. These connect the hub to gadgets that use those protocols (and will replace the SkyConnect dongle).
- The Home Assistant Works With program, which offers certification for products that work with the platform, is expanding. New partners include Aqara, Ultraloq, and Jasco.
- A new Home Assistant voice control hardware device running Home Assistant’s local smart home voice assistant is planned for release at the end of the year.
- Home Assistant is working with Nvidia to incorporate a local AI model into the home automation platform.
- The platform has been researching ways to improve its UI to make it easier for everyone in the home to use Home Assistant. It’s calling this the “Home-approval factor,” a variant on the wife- or spouse-approval factor that encompasses everyone in a home.
(See sidebar for more on these.)
The collective goal of all these efforts is to move Home Assistant toward becoming a more mainstream, out-of-the-box option for smart home users. “We want to be a consumer brand,” says Schoutsen. “You should be able to walk into a Home Depot and be like, ‘I care about my privacy; this is the smart home hub I need.’”
The foundation will also advocate for the development of “better” smart home products, says Schoutsen, “Devices with local APIs and that are built sustainably. Because there needs to be products compatible with Home Assistant that you can trust.”
Is Home Assistant all grown up now?
Schoutsen, who started Home Assistant in 2013 with a Philips Hue smart lighting bridge, a Python script, and a mission to control his lights any way he wanted to, sees the foundation as necessary to both protect Home Assistant and move it forward. “I want to make it clear what our intentions are to the world: That we’re driven by a higher goal than money. And that we are not for sale,” he says. The new ownership structure provides a stronger platform for growth. “It gives us a way for people to take us seriously, to help us reach a bigger audience,” he says.
To date, the informal way Home Assistant operates has been confusing to companies looking to partner with the platform, says Schoutsen. The launch of the for-profit Nabu Casa five years ago provided a revenue stream for Home Assistant through an optional cloud computing service that now supports 33 full-time employees.
The foundation, which was created last month as a Verein (“association”) in Switzerland, formally separates Nabu Casa from Home Assistant. The foundation will own all of the open-source projects, standards, drivers, and libraries associated with Home Assistant, along with ESPHome, ZigPy, and Wyoming.
Nabu Casa will continue as a for-profit entity running the cloud and selling Home Assistant hardware and will operate as a commercial partner of the foundation. “Funding and support can only flow one way—from Nabu Casa, and any future partners, to the Open Home Foundation and its projects,” says Pascal Vizeli, co-founder of Nabu Casa, and a foundation board member.
It also protects Home Assistant from being sold. Swiss law prohibits members of a non-profit Verein from benefiting from it, Schoutsen explained to The Verge. “Our articles state ‘There will be no direct distribution to members in return for activities performed for the association or as any other form of gratuity in any kind,’’’ he says. Similarly, he says the foundation can only have income from membership fees, donations, license programs, and contributions from partners.
Still, Home Assistant users may be wary of these larger structural changes. The Verge asked Schoutsen how he could assuage any fears that this will negatively impact current users. It’s hard not to draw parallels with SmartThings’ shift to become a more “consumer-friendly” platform following its purchase by Samsung.
“We’re constantly doing this balance between ease of use and advanced features and I don’t know how we are going to keep balancing this,” he said. “But we cannot forget about our power users. The platform is open; maybe at some point, there might be a split where we have the basic UI and the advanced UI; I don’t know how that’s going to work. But because we are open, because our data is accessible, they’re all part of the community, even if they don’t use our specific tools that we’re building.”
“There’s a bigger audience that I would like to reach that we don’t today.”
He is also wary of entering the business side of the smart home while recognizing its necessity to grow Home Assistant. “We need to be very careful moving into this space,” he says. “The challenge with partnership people is that they’re very business-focused. And that’s not how we operate.”
He hopes the foundation will provide the necessary building blocks for growth while protecting the platform’s core beliefs and values. “I think we can get even bigger now that we have this stepping stone. The foundation is a real entity. People will take us more seriously. I think the press will take us more seriously. There’s a bigger audience that I would like to reach that we don’t today.”
While today’s mainstream smart home platforms offer simple and convenient ways to control your smart lights, locks, and other gadgets, the lack of access to your data, limited options for local control over devices, and some platforms’ over-reliance on the cloud can put the user at a disadvantage.
Matter — which aims to bring local control and interoperability across all smart home devices and platforms—is designed to solve some of these problems. But Matter isn’t a platform; you’ll still need to use an app on your phone or computer to control your home. Home Assistant wants to be that app.
Can it move fast enough? There’s a long road between forming a foundation and packing Home Depots with Home Assistant hubs and gadgets that pledge Home Assistant loyalty. In the meantime, Matter is also providing other platforms — such as Aqara, Homey, and Hubitat — the tools to expand and grow into more viable alternatives to big tech in the smart home. It’s going to be interesting to see where everything lands.
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Microsoft closed out Summer Game Fest with a bang. The company’s annual June showcase was packed with crowd-pleasers: Halo, Gears of War, Fable, a translucent Xbox, and even some pleasant surprises like new Persona and Crazy Taxi games. It was the kind of event that harkened back to the boisterous days of E3, when the industry was in a healthier place and game reveals were cultural events.
Just three days after the showcase, new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma warned of a “reset” at Microsoft’s gaming division, which would require “making hard choices.” The weeks that followed were filled with reports of impending layoffs, studio closures, and game cancellations. Ninja Theory is reportedly one of the studios on the chopping block, despite having just revealed a new game at SGF. If all this comes to pass, Xbox will be a shell of its former self.
After muscling its way into the console space nearly 25 years ago, Microsoft’s gaming division is at its lowest point ever. And the fallout from some disastrous decisions is going to get very ugly in the coming weeks and months.
It wasn’t always this way. With the arrival of the original Xbox in 2001, Microsoft seemed poised to be a viable contender in the space, with all of its resources helping it play catch-up with the likes of Sony and Nintendo. Major exclusives like Halo and a prescient foray into online play through Xbox Live helped to solidify this position for a time. But Microsoft flubbed the launch of the Xbox One in 2013 with an ill-fated push into non-gaming features like TV, and the brand has never really recovered. With the oft-confusing Xbox Series X / S generation, the company only fell further behind.
There are many reasons for this, but arguably the most damning was Microsoft’s extremely expensive push into subscription services. On paper it made some sense: Streaming services like Netflix were upending the film and TV landscape, so maybe the same could happen for gaming. Microsoft made some absolutely gigantic bets on this unproven future, spending billions of dollars to acquire studios and publishers in an attempt to build out a large library of content for Game Pass that would lure subscribers.
And while Game Pass proved popular initially, it ultimately plateaued, which meant that Microsoft spent all of that money on a business that didn’t grow anywhere near as large as it expected. (The service currently has around 30 million subscribers, while Microsoft had hoped to hit 100 million by 2030.) This misguided play also coincided with the “This is an Xbox” marketing campaign, which suggested that Xbox wasn’t a single console but rather a suite of Game Pass-capable devices, leading to even more confusion around the brand.
Just how bad are things? As Sharma and Xbox’s chief content officer Matt Booty wrote in the “reset” memo, “Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time. Going forward, this cannot continue.” The Activision deal, meanwhile, cost $68.7 billion. The company spent all of that money just to make it even less clear what an Xbox is.
This past February, there was a major shake-up at the Xbox division. Former boss Phil Spencer, who oversaw the brand through the Game Pass push and its many costly acquisitions, retired, while former president and COO Sarah Bond left the company. Despite some uncertainty around her lack of experience in the world of gaming — her prior role at Microsoft was head of the CoreAI division — Sharma’s early days provided some cause for optimism. She appeared willing to listen to fans on things like backward compatibility and exclusives, scrapped the unpopular Microsoft Gaming branding in favor of just Xbox, and moved the brand away from controversial AI features. She also made some strange and superficial changes, like restyling Xbox as XBOX.
But it’s clear the issues at Xbox run much deeper than a simple name change can fix. Sharma inherited a business that spent colossal amounts of money and had little to show for it, and now the bill is coming due. What makes this especially tragic is the sheer pedigree of the game studios that are being impacted. My colleague Tom Warren reported that Microsoft was mulling over closing at least five studios, which includes the likes of Arkane — best known for the wildly influential Dishonored series — and Double Fine Productions, a beloved team behind cult hits like Psychonauts, and more recently Keeper and Kiln. That’s multiple teams filled with talented individuals responsible for some of the most notable games ever made. Now they’re being discarded because of poor decisions they had no part in.
But even amid this apocalyptic landscape, Xbox’s issues feel particularly existential. Its hardware and subscription businesses are both faltering, and now it’s decimating its game development teams as well. Tom reported that the impending layoffs are expected to start next week, and it’s not clear yet just how widespread they will be. Part of the uncertainty is that we don’t know exactly what will happen to these studios; some may be hit with layoffs, some may be closed entirely, and some may be spun off as independent entities.
Whatever happens, though, Xbox will look drastically different once it’s all over. And given the dire state of console gaming, these might not even be the last changes for Microsoft’s gaming division.
- Sharma has done a lot of work to clean up the messaging around Xbox, but plenty of confusion remains, particularly when it comes to the company’s console exclusivity strategy.
- At the same time the Xbox is struggling, a new player is entering the space, as Valve launches the console-like Steam Machine.
- As always, Nintendo largely operates in its own parallel universe that has allowed it to largely weather the current storm.
- Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier has done some excellent reporting on the turmoil at Xbox, and has also helpfully condensed everything into a video on his YouTube channel.
- Matthew Ball is Xbox’s new strategy officer, and in an interview with The Game Business he explained how the brand is thinking about the next console, currently codenamed “Project Helix.”
- Speaking of execs, Booty talked to Game Informer following the SGF showcase to try and explain Xbox’s ever-changing strategy around exclusives, saying that “We want there to be a reason to believe and a reason to buy Xbox.”
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Pudu Robotics has announced what it calls the first “full-scenario robot-serviced hotel.” The project will use robots across the entire guest experience, from reception and room service to cleaning, food preparation and guest support.
The hotel is set to open in 2027, with trial rooms and robot-powered services expected to begin in late 2026. Early guests will be able to try robot check-in and autonomous in-room delivery before the full launch.
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COULD THE NEXT CHINESE THREAT WALK INTO YOUR KITCHEN ON TWO BATTERY-POWERED LEGS?
Pudu Robotics says its robot-run hotel will use AI-powered machines across check-in, room service, cleaning and guest support. (Pudu Robotics)
Where the robot-run hotel will be located
The hotel will sit on West Artificial Island, a man-made island tied to the Shenzhen-Zhongshan Link in Guangdong Province. That cross-sea bridge and tunnel project is one of the Pearl River Delta’s biggest transportation projects.
The location feels fitting. Shenzhen already has a reputation as one of China’s major technology hubs. Room-service delivery robots are already common in hotels across many large Chinese cities.
However, this project goes much further. Instead of adding a few robots to assist hotel staff, Pudu wants to create a connected robot service system that can handle the entire guest experience.
What robots will do inside the hotel
The planned hotel will include 44 high-end rooms, a restaurant, a gym and other guest spaces. Robots will take on roles across the property, including reception, room service, cleaning, food preparation and guest support.
That means you could check in with a robot, have luggage delivered by a robot and order drinks from your phone without calling the front desk. Then, cleaning robots would handle waste detection and room upkeep using AI.
Pudu says its robots will work from one shared intelligence framework. In other words, different machines will handle different jobs while staying connected through the same software system.
The robot staff behind the scenes
Pudu’s FlashBot will run an intelligent vending system, allowing guests to order drink deliveries by smartphone. The PUDU T300 will move luggage from the lobby to rooms.
Meanwhile, the PUDU CC1 Pro and PUDU MT1 cleaning robots will handle cleaning tasks using AI waste-detection technology.
At the Shenzhen launch event, BellaBot Pro served coffee while KettyBot Pro delivered refreshments and snacks. That kind of robotic service may still surprise many travelers. In Shenzhen, though, it already fits into a broader tech culture where robot baristas and drone food delivery are becoming more visible.
HUMANOID ROBOTS WORK NONSTOP IN PACKAGE TEST
Guests will be able to try robot check-in and autonomous in-room delivery during the hotel’s first public trial in late 2026. (Pudu Robotics)
How AI will run the hotel experience
The hotel will rely on PuduFM 1.0, the company’s embodied intelligence foundation model. It will also use PuduAgent to manage intelligent operations across the hotel.
“This partnership represents an important step toward large-scale deployment of embodied intelligence in premium hospitality environments,” said Cong Guo, co-founder and CTO of Pudu Robotics.
He also said the project gives the company a chance to explore new service models where AI and robotics work together to deliver connected service experiences.
That may sound ambitious, yet the rollout will be gradual. The first public trial is expected in late 2026. A broader hotel opening is planned for 2027.
Why China is moving fast with robot hospitality
China has already embraced service robots in hotels, restaurants, airports and public spaces. The robot-run hotel takes that trend into a more advanced phase.
Shenzhen Culture & Tourism Industry Development will work with Pudu Robotics to turn West Artificial Island into a robotics and technology destination. The hotel is only one part of that larger plan.
Over the next four years, the island is expected to add more robotics across tourism and hospitality. That could turn the area into a testing ground for how travelers react when robots handle nearly every service touchpoint.
The hotel is planned as a connected robot service system where different machines handle luggage, deliveries, cleaning and hospitality tasks. (Pudu Robotics)
What this means for you
If this hotel works well, it could change what you expect from travel in the future. Faster check-in, automated deliveries and round-the-clock service may sound convenient, especially when you arrive late or need something quickly.
However, there is another side to this. A robot-run hotel also raises questions about jobs, privacy, safety and what kind of hospitality guests actually want.
Some travelers may love the speed and efficiency. Others may miss the warmth of a person who can read the room, handle a strange request or help when something goes wrong.
That is where this project becomes important. It may show whether people are ready for hotels where AI handles the stay from start to finish.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
China’s first robot-run hotel feels like a major test of how far hospitality automation can go. We have already seen delivery robots roll through hotel hallways. Yet this project puts robots at the center of the entire stay. The convenience could be impressive. You could check in, order drinks, receive luggage and get room support without waiting on a busy front desk. For travelers who value speed, that may feel like a win. Still, hospitality has always been about more than efficiency. A great hotel stay often comes from small human moments. A kind greeting, a helpful suggestion or a quick fix when something goes sideways can make a trip feel easier.
If a robot-run hotel can give you faster service, would you miss the human touch or happily skip the front desk altogether? Let us know by writing to us at CyberGuy.com.
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The Swift Observatory was launched in 2004, but recent solar storms have pushed its orbit lower, and it’s in danger of burning up in Earth’s atmosphere as soon as this year. To try and stave off its demise, NASA has enlisted Katalyst Space Technologies. The company’s Link spacecraft launched Friday with the goal of intercepting Swift, which has no propulsion system, and boosting its orbit back to its original position. Right now, Swift is circling at an altitude of 224 miles, and Link is aiming to raise that by about 150 miles.
Using a three-armed spacecraft to lift a satellite 150 miles higher into orbit is challenging enough, but the speed with which Katalyst pulled the mission together makes it even more impressive. NASA required the company to rush the job because Swift would be too low to save by October. $30 million and nine months later, help is on the way for the $500 million Swift.
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