Forget Alexa — UGreen wants you to use its new local AI assistant to control your smart home

Be honest: Even with the advent of Alexa+ and Gemini, how often do you use those voice assistants in your home for something other than turning on the lights and listening to music?

UGreen is launching its own smart voice assistant as part of a new smart home ecosystem that could help alleviate two emerging concerns of consumers: ever-increasing subscription prices and cloud-based AI that knows too much about you.

Called the UGreen HomeAgent, the system is centered around a local hub, which not only acts as a traditional NAS drive, but also serves as the brains of your home, helping to analyze security camera footage, photos and videos you’ve backed up from your phone. It can also listen for and react to things happening in and around your house, and then automatically activate smart home devices based on the situation. And, it can even create highlight reels of videos and photos it captures of you and your family around the house.

Tying it all together is its assistant “Uliya,” which will let you control everything using nothing but your voice.

I had a chance to check out UGreen’s new HomeAgent at a preview event on September 1. Here’s a rundown of all the components, and what they can do — and the eye-watering price of its top-end devices.

A smarter NAS hub

At the core of everything is the hub, which is essentially a NAS drive with AI. UGreen will offer three versions, the HA100, HA100 Pro and the MasterAgent MA100, each with greater capabilities — and prices.

At the starting end is the HA100, which will provide the basics, such as storage, smart security, and basic smart home control and object identification. Stepping up to the HA100 Pro gives you more advanced AI capabilities, so it will not only be able to identify more objects and things, but also be able to discern what they’re doing. In addition, users will be able to create smart home automations through natural language requests, similar to what you can now do with Alexa+ and Gemini for Home.

The MA100 will blow past the HA100 models with far greater capabilities, such as the ability to run larger models, provide much deeper understanding about the events happening in your home, and developers will be able to create additional skills to augment the hub.

UGreen's AI HomeAgent and smart speaker

The company’s local AI, called HomeAgent, will be able to recognize people, vehicles, pets, and packages, surfaces alerts for unusual activity, summarizes events, and enables keyword search across recorded footage.

The sophistication of the AI you get is dependent on the hub you purchase. For example, if you get the base model HA100, it can recognize dogs and cats as pets, but it can’t distinguish them as either a canine or feline. It also can’t recognize if someone is running, walking, or jumping, only if they enter, leave, or linger.

Beyond that, it will also create highlight reels from events it records on your local cameras, but also be able to respond to such commands as “Show last year’s ski trip on the TV,” “Where’s the dog?” and "What happened at the front door?"

You'll be able to interact with UGreen's AI through the company's smart speaker, by saying "Hey, Uliya" (pronounced YOU-lee-yah). The speaker, which is about the size of the Amazon Echo Show 5, will cost $99, but can be preordered for $69.

Security cameras

UGreen is launching three security cameras: two outdoor cameras and one indoor camera — that will record video locally to the home hub.

The SynCare Indoor Cam ID500 Pro ($149; preorder for $89) is a 4K pan/tilt camera not unlike what you'll find from TP-Link or Wyze. It can rotate 360 degrees and tilt 111 degrees, can automatically follow people across the room, and has Wi-Fi 6.

UGreen's two outdoor cameras — the $159 SynCare PoE Cam OD600 Pro, and $199 SynCare Battery Cam OD800 Pro — both have a single 4K camera and dual 3K cameras, with a wide-angle lens and then a pan/tilt camera below. The PoE camera has Motion-Activated & Starlight Night Vision, while the Battery Camera has PIR & Radar Detection, as well as a solar panel to help keep its battery charged.

Digital Photo Frame

Once UGreen has backed up all your photos, how best to display them all? The UGreen Gallery digital picture frame uses a 13.3-inch eInk Spectra 6 display with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 — the same as used on the Aura Ink, one of the best digital photo frames. It connects via Wi-Fi, but can also be outfitted with a 512GB microSD card, so you could presumably load more photos onto the device. However, it’s not meant to rapidly cycle through images. The photo frame will cost $299 in preorder, and $439 later on; that's similar to other E-Ink photo frames.

Smart Home functionality

UGreen’s hub is Matter-compatible, which means that homeowners will be able to integrate other smart home devices, and then create automations and routines, which can be activated automatically or via voice command.

At launch, HomeAgent will work with a number of Aqara devices, such as the Aqara Camera Hub G5 Pro, Aqara Doorbell Camera Hub G410, Eve motion sensors and dimmer switches, and GE Cync LED light strips.

Outlook

UGreen’s home-based AI means that any processing of personal information, such as videos and photos, is done locally, rather than in the cloud. That means that the images of you and your kids won’t be exposed to any training models, or risk being compromised.

And, because it’s done locally, you also won’t have to pay recurring subscription fees to save video in the cloud — a requirement of many of the best home security cameras and video doorbells. Likewise, as the hub can also act as a backup for your phone, you can ditch cloud subscriptions to Google, Samsung, and Apple if you want to save all your precious memories.

UGreen is not alone in this approach. Earlier today, Anker announced the MindBase, a similar central hub with a built-in local AI that will be able to analyze security camera footage and control your smart home devices.

Of course, the time it takes to recoup those costs will be years, once you add in the price of not just the UGreen hub, but also the hard drives and other accessories. Even the least expensive hub costs $899, and that's before you equip it with any storage, which itself is rocketing in price. Given the rising costs of subscriptions, though, that break-even point may come sooner rather than later.