Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
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TL;DR
- UGREEN is launching three smart home hubs that combine network storage, video recording, and local AI processing.
- Instead of talking to Gemini in the cloud like you do with Google Home, here all voice commands are processed by the hub itself.
- Depending on your needs, UGREEN’s hardware can offer some seriously heavy-duty NVIDIA AI silicon.
Smart homes are getting smarter, and that might just be a problem. While the idea of a more feature-reach, accessible, and proactive smart home sounds great on face value, the growing reliance of so many of these systems on cloud-based AI is making some shoppers think twice. UGREEN believes it might just have the solution in the form of some advanced smart home hubs.
Ecosystems like Google Home tap into cloud-powered AI continually, from processing your voice input, to analyzing your Nest camera footage. Beyond obvious privacy considerations, there’s also the subscription cost to consider with the more advanced camera functionality, to say nothing of storage.
Stephen Schenck / Android Authority
Rather than leaning so heavily on the cloud for those solutions, UGREEN wants to make all your smart home processing local. Everything from interpreting voice input to even watching all your cameras for package thieves can take place on one of the company’s three smart hubs: the HomeAgent HA100, HomeAgent HA100 Pro, and MasterAgent MA100.
All three offer the same basic setup — in addition to controlling your smart home with support for Matter devices, and offering AI processing, each offers a 2-bay SATA NAS as well as space for a dedicated drive for video storage.
The differences manifest as more and more capable AI processing capabilities, faster and more feature-rich local networking, and arguably the most shocking one here — price.
The base HomeAgent has 16GB of RAM and is capable of a rated 26 TOPS AI performance. The Pro ups that to 32GB, adds extra GPU and NPU processing help, and bumps that performance rating an order of magnitude up to 205 TOPS. You’ll pay about $900 for the HomeAgent, and $3,000 for the Pro.
Those are both a lot pricier than a lot of people are going to expect to spend for a dedicated smart home hub — and this is before you even add your hard drives for storage.
But then there’s the MasterAgent. The hardware is undeniably slick — its big claim to fame is that it taps into the power of NVIDIA Jetson Thor T5000 silicon for its onboard AI. Combine that with 128GB RAM, and some other upgrades like a 100Gbps PoE switch, and this is looking like a best-in-class solution. UGREEN wants $20,000 for it.
That’s a used car. That’s a nice, big vacation. That’s not the sort of cash any of us are used to dropping on a product like this. There’s clearly a lot of potential here, and users could feel empowered to try out all sorts of new models on their beefy NVIDIA AI hardware, discovering new ways to enhance their smart home experience — but with a hugely expensive bill of entry.
The company intends to jump-start sales with some early-bird half-off deals, and with prices this large to begin with, that also adds up to some giant discounts. But if you miss that boat, UGREEN might just have its work ahead of it in convincing shoppers that this is a smart use for a sizable fraction of their salary. If you’re curious about checking one out, you can get your pre-order in with a $50 deposit.
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