MacRumors Giveaway: Win a Brilliant Control for Your Smart Home Devices

Adding Brilliant to your wall gives you the option of motion control, voice, touch and the companion app. So yes, you can control all of your products using multiple apps from your iOS, but can guests or kids? Sure, if you hand over your phone every time you want to turn a light on or off and search for the app. Brilliant unifies all of this. There are a lot of great features like our video intercom that you can use to talk from room to room (encrypted and privacy screen included). Right now our Ring integration displays a notification on the Brilliant screen if someone presses the button, or it will display the video feed if you prefer. If you have a smart lock connected (via a hub), you will the option to open the door directly from the notification. These are just a few examples. I hope that helped!

I have no kids. Or friends of any kind. "Visitors" (a/k/a "trespassers") are shot on sight. Yes, there's the occasional pizza delivery person; but that's on a strictly "leave the pizza, money's in the box" basis. How can this product help me? And no comments on "how I should live me life"-- Mother used to do that, before she passed.

We do plan to have a HomeKit-friendly version in the near future, and will have an upgrade path. You wouldn’t need to rewire anything, just swap out a faceplate.

HomeKit absolutely key.

We currently work with Sonos and Bose but are looking into AirPlay 2 as you said.
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No problem :)
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It is in the device, "Brilliant turn on the lights." Alexa is also built in and as I mentioned in a previous comment we are planning integration with HomeKit as well.
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I appreciate your opinion and gather you may not be a huge fan of smart homes in general. For those who are interested in smart homes Brilliant is a central device unifying all of the other smart home products and as I mentioned has voice, motion, touch and app control options for added convenience. Things like motion control and "Away Mode" help save money on bills as well, which I think we all can agree is beneficial.

You are making assumptions. I like smart home and have several connected devices already. I don't like redundancy. Sure, the away mode sounds useful, but let's talk about the money savings aspect of it. We have five bedrooms, plus kitchen, dinning room and two living rooms. In order to control all the devices in each area of the house we would need at least five units for the bedrooms and at least three more for the living rooms and the kitchen. That's eight devices. They start at $200 each? Say we stick with that basic configuration. That's $1,600 plus tax. Our house is modern, has high efficiency appliances, windows and LED lighting throughout. Our utilities add up to about $200 a month. It includes a marine tank, computers and other devices, like the fridge, that cannot be turned off on in the away mode. We already have a smart thermostat. If the away mode saves us 10% on bills each month, which I think is a generous assumption, then it will take almost 8 years just to cover the cost of the devices before any savings are realized. I can already do all this with a smart phone. In fact, I could by two iPad Minis for each floor of the house as extra house control devices - plus they double as full pledges media consumption devices.

Ok, so I can't enjoy the "groundhog day" experience of the lights turning on, music starting automatically and the weather forecast being announced as I walk into a room. Yeah, that won't get annoying after a while.

There is one application where these products make sense. I could see builders putting them into new homes. That's the market you should be targeting. Rebounding market where shoppers want efficiency. The added cost is small in terms of the overall purchase, builder can install easily. Low cost there. Plus, they can command significant margins on top of it, as they do with most new home upgrades.

We do plan to have a HomeKit-friendly version in the near future, and will have an upgrade path. You wouldn’t need to rewire anything, just swap out a faceplate.

Good to know, thanks for reading the forums!

Hmmm no HomeKit?

We do plan to have a HomeKit-friendly version in the near future, and will have an upgrade path. You wouldn’t need to rewire anything, just swap out a faceplate.