- [Edwards] I'm Andru Edwards and you're watching Gear Live.
(upbeat music)
My Home Tech is one the raid right now
with appliances being able to be controlled
with apps and even by voice.
Apple smart home platform is called HomeKit
and it allows you to control your devices in multiple ways.
In this episode, I give you a look at
my five favorite HomeKit devices that I use here
in my smart home.
What's going on TechSquad,
Andru Edwards, editor of chief of GearLive.com.
If you're in to tech and gadgets,
feel free to hit that subscribe button down below
along with the bell notifications icon
so you don't miss any future videos.
As I mentioned today, I'm telling you all about
my smart home.
Here in my home, I use Apple's HomeKit smart home platform,
so all the smart home devices that I use here,
I can control using Siri.
Now one caveat before I get into the best HomeKit devices
that I use here, I actually only buy devices
that work with all three of the major smart home platforms,
so those would be Apple's HomeKit,
along with Amazon's Alexa,
which is probably the most popular,
and the Google Assistant as well.
There was also Microsoft's Cortana,
which is a smart home platform
but doesn't have anywhere near
the reach of those other three.
But the reason why I wanted to bring that up
is because anything I mention in this video,
if you use Alexa or if you use the Google Assistant
instead of HomeKit,
these will all work in your home as well.
Let's hit the basis of the HomeKit smart home
with how I control everything.
I have HomePods spread out throughout the house.
In fact, I have eight HomePods here in my home,
which allow me to control all the devices
that I'm going to talk about in this video.
If you're unaware, the HomePod is Apple's smart speaker
that adapts to its location in the room
to deliver hifi audio and it sounds great.
They're about seven inches tall, but they're super dense,
and if you haven't heard one,
the sound is pretty incredible.
Now you might be wondering what does a speaker have to do
with controlling your smart home.
Well the HomePods also have Siri built in
and they're always listening for that Yo Siri command.
So these serve as your HomeKit base station
so you control any of your HomeKit compatible devices
by speaking your command to a HomePod.
Now of course you do not have to have a HomePod
or multiple HomePods in your home.
You can control your HomeKit devices using an iPhone,
an iPad, an iPod touch, an Apple watch, a Mac,
or even an Apple TV.
But the reason I like having HomePods around
is also because guests can use them as well.
So now with that established let's jump into my list
of the top five best HomeKit compatible smart home devices,
starting with Serena Shades.
In what may be the coolest item on the list,
Serena Shades are smart shades for the connected home
that you can control using you voice.
You can easily open or close your blinds by saying
Yo Siri, open the blinds or Yo Siri, close the blinds.
But you can also say things like
Yo Siri, open the blinds in the living room halfway
or Yo Siri, open the blinds in my office twenty five percent
or even Yo Siri, open all the blinds upstairs.
Now since I use HomeKit I could also take advantage
of different scenes that's basically programming
all your devices to work together
and do things at a certain time or with a certain command.
For example, if I were to say Yo Siri, good night,
my front door's gonna lock if it's unlocked,
my garage door's gonna close if it's open,
all the main lights you're gonna turn off,
all the night lights are going to turn one,
and all the blinds are gonna be lowered,
all with that one single command.
As far as the Serena Shades go, they're battery powered,
which means no wires but maintenance and easy distillation.
I actually have eight of these Serena Shades in my home,
and all eight of them combined
took about an hour to get installed.
So it really just takes a few minutes to install these,
and once they're up, you can just flip it open
to swap batteries if they every run out.
Now I've had them for a few months,
no battery issues so far.
I also like that there's a ton of options
to customize the shades to your liking,
with over 150 fabrics and colors.
The shades move smoothly and barely make a sound,
which is a nice improvement over my older blinds.
They were so automatic but they needed a remote,
and when you move them up or down,
it was cool that they would do it automatically,
but they were slow and they were loud.
So big shout out to Lutron with these Serena Shades
that operate smoothly.
As far as pricing goes, it's hard to say
because you need to measure our own windows,
and then custom make them to fit into your home environment.
But if you wanna check them out for yourself,
head over to serenashades.com.
Alright number two on my list
of my favorite HomeKit smart home devices
is my Chamberlain Smart Garage Door Opener.
Chamberlain sells six different garage door openers,
but the one I have is the B970 ultra quiet version
with battery backup.
The unit connects to your home network over Wifi.
It can be controlled with the included wall switch,
wireless keypad, a smartphone app,
or your voice assistant of choice.
This is pretty straight forward as asking Siri
to open or close your garage door
from anywhere in the world, it is pretty great.
You can also ask for the status of your garage door
by asking if the garage door is open or closed.
If you use a voice command to close your garage door,
it will emit a warning tone in order to let anyone
to know what may be standing in the way
or may have something in the way of the door closing
that they should move because that garage door
is about to come down.
Being a HomeKit device, you can also get alerts
on your phone when the garage door's opened or closed,
and by the way for some strange reason, I'm not sure why,
you can use this with HomeKit,
you can use this with Amazon Alexa,
but if you choose to use it with the Google Assistant,
Chamberlain is gonna charge you either one dollar per month
or ten dollars per year for the privilege of using it
with the Google Assistant, which makes no sense to me.
As far as pricing goes, you can pick up the Chamberlain B970
smart garage door opener for about 250 dollars.
Up next on my list of my favorite smart home devices
that work with HomeKit is the August Smart Door Lock Pro.
This is the smart door lock that I use to protect my home,
and it allows me to lock and unlock my front door
from anywhere, while granting access to friends and family.
Unless we track exactly who's coming and going,
and I can get alerts anytime my front door
is locked or unlocked.
The August Smart Door Lock also has automatic lock
and automatic unlock, and that works with geofencing,
so if I were to leave my home,
I have it set up so that anytime I pull into my driveway,
the front door automatically unlocks.
That way I get out of my car,
I walk up to my front door, and it's already opened,
and that way I don't have to fumble for any keys
or open up an app.
Now I also have the August Smart Doorbell Cam Pro,
which works hand in hand with the smart door lock.
When someone rings the doorbell, I get a notification
that allows be to see a photo of who it is.
I can then start a video conversation with them
right on my device and at the bottom of that conversation
is the door lock control so I can unlock the door
and let the in if it's someone I want to have in my house.
You can pick up the August Smart Door Lock Pro right now
for roughly 220 dollars.
Alright moving on to number four, let's talk about
the Ecobee4 Smart Thermostat.
Ecobee4 connects to your home Wifi network,
allowing you to control the temperature from anywhere
that you have an internet connection.
This isn't new as there are a few other devices out there
that can do the same thing,
however there are a couple of things
that set the Ecobee4 apart for competition.
The first of which is obviously built in support
for Apple's HomeKit and Yo Siri support as well.
She can raise and lower your temperature with your voice,
but you can also include it in scenes
like I talked about earlier.
For example, you can use HomeKit
to recognize when the sun sets.
You can say in the summer time when the sun goes down,
turn off the AC,
and in the winter time when the sun goes down,
turn on the heat.
You can also use that geofencing feature
to say turn off your HVAC system when you leave the house,
and then when you leave the office,
turn it back on so that your house
is to the temperature of your liking
when you go through your front door.
Even more impressive, the Ecobee4 is not just controllable
with Amazon's Alexa,
but it actually is an Alexa device itself.
What I mean by that is you can talk
directly to the thermostat
and it will talk back at you in Alexa's voice.
So for all intents and purposes,
the Ecobee4 has an Amazon Echo Dot built in.
You can use that functionality
to control the temperature itself.
You can use that functionality
to control your other smart home devices,
and of course you can use it
to just ask Alexa various trivia questions.
You can pick up the Ecobee4 right now for about 230 dollars.
And last but certainly not least on my list
of the best Apple HomeKit compatible smart home devices
and probably the easiest one to get into
is Philips Hue Smart Lightbulbs.
Philips Hue is my favorite line of smart lights
as Philips has just about every type
of light you can think of, both indoor and out.
They've got starter kits, bulbs, light strips, lamps,
and all sorts of accessories to control them all.
The lights are all energy efficient,
LEDs can come in a bunch of shapes and sizes
to fit your home perfectly.
Everything can be controlled
from the Phililps Hue app itself,
but of course since this video is focused on Apple's HomeKit
you can also control them with Siri.
Simple commands to not just turn the lights off and on
are there, you can also change colors,
you've got commands like Yo Siri turn the lights
in the kitchen blue, or Yo Siri turn the lights
in the dining room to eighty percent brightness.
One that I use almost daily is part of a scene,
which is Yo Siri, I'm watching TV.
What that does is turn off all the lights
in the living room, turn on a bias light behind the TV,
and lowers the light in the kitchen
to twenty percent brightness, all with that one command.
The easiest way to get started with Philips Hue
is with a starter kit, you can get four smart bulbs
that can emit millions of colors along with the Hue Bridge
for 200 dollars.
And that Hue Bridge by the way can support
up to fifty different Hue lighting accessories.
Now those are my top five
best Apple HomeKit compatible smart home devices.
If you wanna see another cool smart device
I have here in my home,
be sure to check out the video
on the Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator
with the ridiculous 21.5 inch display
and big speed voice control built in.
I will leave a link to it up here in the card
as well as down in the description below.
If you wanna use HomeKit for your smart home
and you have questions for me
about any of the devices I talked about
or just HomeKit in general,
drop them down in the comments below
and I will meet you there for further discussion.
Big shout out to all the channel supporters.
If you wanna become a member officially of the TechSquad
for exclusive behind the scenes perks, secret videos,
and more, there's a link down in the description below
to that as well.
Thank you so much for watching guys,
I appreciate your support.
I'm Andru Edwards and I will catch you in the next video.
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