A house that knows who is asking.
An assistant that answers in the room you are standing in, runs every calendar in the household, remembers what the plumber said, and never sends a word of it anywhere. No subscription, no account, no microphone reporting to a platform. Built for a family home, and for houses big enough to need half a rack.
What this actually is
It is not a better smart speaker. A smart speaker is a microphone that sends what you said to a company and reads back an answer. This is a computer in your house that holds a capable model, knows your household, and is connected to the things you already own - so it can answer questions about your life rather than about the world.
The difference people notice first is not the intelligence. It is that it knows who is speaking, and that everything it says and does follows from that.
A day with it.
The best way to explain this is not a feature list. It is what actually happens, in a house where it has been running for a couple of months.
Seven in the morning, kitchen
"What do I need to know about today?"
The three things that are actually different about today, not a calendar read aloud. A meeting moved, the car needs to leave fifteen minutes early because of the roadworks, and it is non-uniform day, which is on the school feed and nobody looked at.
Mid-morning, anywhere
"Add rice and bin bags."
Said in the room you noticed, to the house rather than to a phone. It lands on the shared list, merges with the rice somebody already added, and knows which shop you usually get it from.
Afternoon, study
"When did we last have the boiler serviced, and what did he say about the pressure?"
It read the invoice when it was filed and the note you dictated afterwards. This is the part that surprises people: a household has a memory, and until now it lived in one person's head.
School run, hallway
"Is there anything for next week I should have sorted?"
A birthday on Saturday with no present bought, a trip that needs paying for by Friday, kit required Thursday, and a dentist appointment that collides with pickup. The clashes, found before they happen.
Evening, sitting room
"It's cold in here and the kids are still up."
Heating in this room, not the house. It knows which room you are in because you spoke in it, and it knows who you are because of how you said it.
Late, front door
"Lock up."
Doors, gates, alarm. And because that is a consequential thing to do on a voice alone, a confirmation lands on your phone first. Every time, including for you.
Who is speaking is the permission.
A household is not one user. It is adults, teenagers, small children, a cleaner on Tuesdays, a contractor in the hall, and someone's parents staying for a week. They should not all be able to ask for the same things, and nobody is going to type a password at a microphone.
Voice identifies. It does not authenticate.
We would rather say this before you ask. Recognising a voice is convenient and it is not a credential: recordings replay, siblings sound alike, children imitate parents for sport, and a convincing copy of anyone's voice can be made from a few seconds of them speaking in public.
So voice is used to decide what a request is allowed to be, never to approve a consequential one on its own. Anything that spends money or opens a door takes a second factor as well. A cloned voice gets you a weather forecast.
Ambient
Anyone, guests included
Time, weather, timers, music, the light in the room they are standing in
Second factor: None needed
Household
Family, recognised
Add to the list, add or move an event, ask what is on this week, intercom, heating
Second factor: None
Spend
Named adults
Build a basket, reorder a regular item, book a service
Second factor: Confirm on a known phone before anything is committed
Physical
Named adults, individually
Gates, external doors, garage, alarm state
Second factor: Always. A phone confirmation or presence at a panel, never voice alone
Private
One person only
Their own calendar detail, messages, anything medical
Second factor: Never volunteered to a room. Answered to that person, quietly
Children get a tier of their own, which is mostly about what it will not do: no ordering, no doors, no reading out an adult's calendar, and no answering questions about where somebody is. A guest gets ambient only and is forgotten when they leave, because a houseguest should not leave a voice profile behind.
Six things, and the sixth is the point.
Every calendar in the house, merged
Each adult's work and personal calendars, the children's, the shared household one, and the feeds everybody subscribes to and nobody reads: term dates, non-uniform days, parents' evenings, fixtures, exam timetables, clubs and lessons. Plus who is coming to the house this week and whether someone needs to be in.
The list, and the basket
Anyone adds by voice from any room. It deduplicates, sorts by where you actually buy each thing, and learns what runs out on roughly what cycle. When it is time to order, it fills the basket and a named adult presses buy - which is both the honest limit and the right safeguard.
The house you already have
Lighting, heating, blinds, music, cameras, gates. It sits on top of the control system rather than replacing it, and becomes the layer that understands a sentence instead of a scene number. If you have Lutron, Control4, Home Assistant or similar, that stays.
The household's memory
Where the spare key went, which drawer the passports are in, what the plumber said, the code for the gate on the paddock, which paint was used in the hall. The institutional knowledge of a house, which currently leaves when the person holding it does.
Answers in the room you are in
You speak where you noticed the thing, and the answer comes back from the same room. No phone, no app, no wake-word theatre from three rooms away. Satellites are cheap and dumb; all the intelligence is on one machine in a cupboard.
And it never phones home
No subscription, no account, no cloud. The model, the speech recognition and the voice all run on hardware in your house. Unplug your internet and it keeps working, which is the simplest test of the claim and one you can run yourself.
The four things worth knowing before you want one.
Every page like this lists capabilities and stops. These are the things that come up in month one, and you should hear them now rather than then.
It cannot place an order by itself
There is no sanctioned way for software to place arbitrary consumer orders on your behalf, and anyone promising voice-to-doorstep is glossing over that. It builds the basket; a person confirms. You would want that boundary at the spend tier anyway.
It is not as clever as the frontier models
On hard reasoning, a model running in your cupboard is behind the best hosted ones and will stay behind them. On the work a house actually needs - reading your documents, merging your week, drafting, answering from what it has - the gap is small enough not to notice.
It will mishear things
Across a room, over a dishwasher, with two people talking. It is good, not perfect, and it asks rather than guessing when it is unsure - which is more useful than confident nonsense but occasionally more annoying.
It needs a few weeks to become yours
Out of the box it is a capable assistant that knows nothing about your household. The value comes from what it is connected to and what it has read, and that is a few weeks of tuning rather than an afternoon.
Microphones in your house is a serious thing to agree to.
It is the right instinct, and the answers below are the reason this is worth doing at all rather than buying something off a shelf.
Rooms with no microphone, physically
Bedrooms, bathrooms, a study if you want it. Not a setting that an update or a well-meaning installer can turn back on - no device in the room at all. A privacy guarantee you can confirm by looking is worth more than one you have to read about.
Nothing leaves, and you can prove it
No account, no subscription, no cloud service in the path. Audio is turned into text on your own machine and the text is answered on your own machine. Pull the internet out of the wall and it still works, which is a test you can run on the day we hand it over.
You decide what is kept
Recordings are not retained by default. Conversation history is kept for as long as you set and no longer, and you can set it to nothing - you lose the ability to say "what did I ask you yesterday", which is a fair trade some households want to make.
Staff arrive and staff leave
A housekeeper, a nanny, a contractor for six weeks. Each is an identity with a scope, and the half that matters is removing it the day they go. There is also a record of what the assistant was asked to do - not recordings, actions - which is what you want if a gate opened at two in the morning.
A family home, or an estate.
The family build
One household, four to eight rooms covered, one machine in a cupboard with a single graphics card. Enough for a family talking to it one or two at a time, every calendar in the house, the lists, and a few thousand documents indexed.
- A tower, not a rack. Lives in a cupboard or a utility room.
- Install in a day, useful in two to three weeks.
- Previous-generation hardware keeps this genuinely affordable.
The estate deployment
Several buildings, twenty to forty rooms, staff and guests with their own scopes, and an existing control and security system that is not going anywhere. Four people talking in four rooms at once is the normal case, so it takes a datacentre-class card rather than a used one.
- Half a rack on castors, pre-built and wheeled into a plant room.
- A wired backbone, with fibre between buildings where the run needs it.
- If it holds the gates and the heating, a second machine so it cannot simply stop.
From the first conversation to living with it.
Nothing here is a surprise on the day. This is the whole process.
A conversation and a walk round
Which rooms, which of them should never have a microphone, who lives here, who works here, what is already on the network, and where a machine could live with power and airflow. An hour or two, and it is the step that makes the rest predictable.
We build it before we bring it
The machine is assembled, tested and loaded with the models in our workshop, not on your kitchen table. For a larger house that is half a rack on castors, wheeled into a plant room. You get a date, and it is a real one.
Install day
Satellites in the rooms you chose, the machine connected to power and network, integration with whatever control system you already run. A family home is a day. A large house with several buildings is a few, mostly cabling.
Two or three weeks of it learning your house
Calendars connected, the school feeds subscribed, voices enrolled, permissions set with you rather than for you, and the documents you want it to know about indexed. This is the part that turns it from clever into useful.
Then we keep it running
Updates, model refreshes, new rooms, a new member of staff to enrol or remove, and somebody to call when something stops. Monthly, and you can stop it whenever you like - the hardware and everything on it are yours.
On price
A family build is the price of a decent domestic appliance plus a modest monthly line, and it moves with what graphics cards cost that month - which, as of late 2026, is a great deal more than a year ago. An estate deployment is a project and is quoted after somebody has walked round. We will give you a number once we have seen the house, and not before, because a figure invented over the phone is one of us being wrong.
Thinking about it for a company instead?
The same stack, sized for a business, with the evidence trail that makes it defensible to a customer, an auditor or a regulator. A house is also a genuinely good way to see what this feels like before committing an organisation to it.
Ready to see verifiable compliance?
Book a demo. Connect your stack. Share auditor-defensible evidence in days, not months.