Toshiba's Symbio smart speaker offers six smart home functions in one device

[Polycount]

Toshiba's new Symbio smart speaker could be considered the jack of all trades of the smart home world. Symbio offers "six smart home functions in one easy-to-use device" including Alexa voice control, smart home hub features, smart sound detection, an intercom, a built-in security camera and smart speaker functionality.

Though a jack of all trades is usually a master of none, Symbio's feature set appears to be fairly robust. The 1080p HD security camera can stream live video to the Toshiba Smart Home app at any time (while recording video history for later review), the built-in intercom enables two-way communication between you and your family and Symbio's Alexa integration allows for pretty comprehensive smart home control.

In addition to viewing security camera footage, the Toshiba Smart Home app will allow you to control all of your connected smart home devices remotely without the need to directly access Symbio's smart home hub functionality. You'll be able to activate smart door locks, tweak your home's lighting and adjust the temperature while you're out and about.

All of these features don't come cheap, though, as Symbio is currently available on Amazon with a $250 price tag, making it one of the more expensive smart home devices on the market.

"Symbio is a tremendous addition to our growing portfolio of Toshiba Visual Solutions consumer smart home products, which includes our smart TVs with voice search and home appliance control services," said Mineo Maruyama, Vice President of Toshiba. "By integrating the latest IoT technologies, such as AI, audio technologies and voice recognition, we will continue to expand the functionality of today’s smart homes while providing easy, useful and personalized services to support this evolution in the future."

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https://www.techspot.com/news/72609-toshiba-symbio-smart-speaker-offers-six-smart-home.html

 

[wiyosaya]

I'll be happy when the day comes that the IoT fad is dead.

 

[senketsu]

I'll be happy when the day comes that the IoT fad is dead.

just like with the mass adoption of computers on the www, smartphones etc., and now we are getting hacked, surveilled and the like, left, right and center, I can see IoT adoption growing immensely without too much bad press, but like the first situation, news will start to come out about how all of this IoT stuff is being massively as well as criminally abused.
IMHO it would be much better to work on securing current stuff better before we embark on all this new stuff. Perhaps then it can be designed and implemented more securely. Until things like the crypto debate is over (and crypto wins) and there are laws in place that are enforced about how all our data is used we are just pissing into the wind