Amidst the popularity of Essential's PH-1 is enjoying at the moment, a new smart home device developed by the startup will soon be joining the budding competition in the market. Essential co-founder Andy Rubin goes straightforward telling the press that his smart home is more than just the Amazon Echo.
Essential joins smart home race
At the Code Conference 2017 event last night in Ranchos Palos Verdes, California, Andy Rubin, the father of Android, set the record straight about its new project, Home, claiming that it is more than just another Amazon Echo rival. He described Essential's Home as an all-in-one device which can do what all the other smart assistants can.
Rubin underscored that at the core of this product is Ambient, an open-source operating system that can accommodate third-party devices such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. While the PH-1 smartphone runs on vanilla Android, Essential chose to build a new operating system for its home assistant, a venture that Rubin divulged to be a "hundreds of millions" investment.
Essential president and COO Niccolo de Masi told TechCrunch the rationale behind that decision. "We believe that we're in the best position to do that unleashing. And in the home, there is no horizontal, open-source ecosystem focused on interoperability. And we also think we have a lot of experience with that", says de Masi.
At par
The executives of the California startup agree that Essential is at par with Apple, Amazon, and Google in the home assistants department despite it a newcomer. Rubin and his team's goal is to create a technology to become a hub of various programs. He believed that people want diversity in their home so they would bank on other products made by other manufacturers.
As for Ambient, he does not see it as an outright competition of Echo and other products of the same kind. "It's a case of doing something well, which for us is choreographing the home experience and automation. We want to effectively connect all of the walled garden experiences in a digital point solution and not create more fragmentation" says de Masi.
