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Enblink dongle now lets you control your home appliances using voice commands
In case you've never heard of Enblink, here's a one-sentence primer: it's an $85 dongle that plugs into your Google TV box, allowing you to control any Z-Wave-enabled appliance (door locks, lights, etc.) using an app. Got it? Good. Anyway, as of a few days ago, you can control everything using voice commands (Google TV still required). Basically, once you've gone through the trouble of creating so-called scenes, like dimming your living room lights, you'll need to go into the settings menu of the app and add a voice widget to the main screen. From there, you can use commands like "lamp on," "TV off" and "dim." The three-minute video below breaks it down nicely -- and serves as a helpful introduction to folks who had never heard of Enblink before today.
Enblink turns any Google TV device into a home automation control center
Meet Enblink: a dongle that plugs into any Google TV device and turns it into a home automation control hub. Enblink works with any Z-Wave enabled gadget, from door locks and lamps to security sensors and video cameras. The dongle itself will serve as a Z-Wave radio (once it's passed through the Z-Wave certification process) when plugged into your GTV device of choice. From there, its software runs atop GTV's Android underpinnings and leverages the device's CPU to control the locks and lights in your abode. A companion app for Android turns your phone into a remote control and monitor for appliances hooked into the Enblink system, plus there's an iOS app currently in development. Input from mobile devices goes through Amazon Web Services, which relays commands to the dongle to execute your bidding from afar. It's up for pre-order right now for $85, with the price rising to $99 when it officially goes on sale sometime in the next month or two. Of course, if you're streaming video to your mobile device, there's an ongoing fee (of undetermined cost) for the privilege once you've used up your free allotment of 30 seconds of streaming per day. Regardless, by leveraging existing GTV hardware and AWS to do the lifting on the backend, Enblink is a fraction of the cost of many purpose-built home automation base stations. So if you're a home automation geek that counts yourself among those very few with a Google TV and a slew of Z-Wave toasters, locks and light bulbs, your ship has, at long last, come in. Update: We snagged some rendered screenshots of the TV and mobile UI, check 'em out after the break.
