LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM— The Earzz Smart Home Monitor is an intelligent new home companion that aims to transform the lives of those with hearing loss by always listening for the important sounds you need to hear in your home.
The Earzz monitor identifies and notifies you of the sounds you want monitored through its accompanying intuitive app which delivers real-time notifications to your smart-devices – watches, tablets, and phones. This means if you are hard of hearing you don’t miss a sound, or if you have mobility issues you can identify a noise without having to physically go to check.
While other smart home systems focus on voice recognition to convert speech into commands, Earzz is dedicated to listening out for anomalies in sound instead of speech, instantly sending tailored notifications to your device based on pre-selected alerts – and because the audio files are never stored, your privacy is guaranteed.
All of this is done via a single wireless device that fits in the palm of your hand.
“Throughout our journey developing Earzz, we have received invaluable feedback from the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, highlighting the crucial need for improved alerting devices within our homes. This not only influenced what we built, but also how we built it! We want accessibility and inclusion to be at the heart of Earzz, not an afterthought and we truly hope it helps provide convenience and peace of mind in the home.”
–Prad Thiruvenkatanathan, Inventor and Founder of Earzz
Customizable Earzz
Whether you want to know when your kids are home from school, your cat has come through the cat flap or your mail has arrived, the Earzz experience has been designed from the ground up to be fully customizable by users.
Simply place the Earzz device in the appropriate area of your home and use the intuitive app (iOS/Android) to configure your Earzz for what to listen out for. You will receive instant notifications on your smartphone, tablet, or watch, dependent on network availability.
Thanks to a built-in rechargeable battery, the Earzz device can work wirelessly for up to 8 hours, or it can be left permanently plugged into power via the USB-C socket.
If one Earzz isn’t enough, you can connect multiple Earzz Smart Home Monitors to the app and place them all over your home.
Earzz recognizes and alerts for an expansive list of sounds, including most of the common sounds in our homes – and is constantly growing its sound library. Sounds in certain settings may sound different, which is why Earzz has built in the infrastructure to help the algorithms improve through customer feedback, becoming more accurate at recognizing specific sounds.
Some examples of events that can trigger alerts are:
- In the hallway: Doorbells, knocking, buzzers.
- In the kitchen/utility room: Appliance beeps, water running, alarms.
- In the nursery: Crying, child sounds.
- Wherever your pets roam: Cat meows, dog barks.
Earzz also comes with Activity monitoring so you can know when audible sounds are heard in parts of your home.
Within the app, you can choose how you get notified, which devices get notified, and opt to pause notifications with a few taps. You can also select the notification frequency, choosing how often you get alerted for repeating sounds. The in-app log also lets you keep track of when sounds were captured.
Privacy & Security
To ensure privacy, the company employs patent-pending AI technology to only identify sound anomalies, not speech, and the audio is deleted after it has been processed. The brand also uses secure cloud infrastructure for privacy, security, and scalability.
The devices use industry-standard Secure Boot to ensure that only authorized Earzz firmware runs on them, and encrypted communication protocols ensure the privacy and security of all data communicating to and from the Earzz monitors.
Price and Availability
According to the company, the Earzz smart home monitor is launching this summer in the UK and will be available in black and white with prices starting at £7.99/month for an annual subscription from earzz.com, with the first monitor offered free.
Source: Earzz
