After storming the NAS market, for its next trick UGREEN is planning to automate your home with AI and voice control. The company has just unveiled all its AIoT gear at IFA, which includes a dedicated machine to handle all the AI processing. What’s more, the whole setup is local, so you won’t be handing over all your private photos and behaviour to Amazon or Google.
UGREEN CEO and founder Samuel Zhang introduced the new lineup at the IFA tradeshow in Berlin, saying the concept started with a family BBQ. Zhang says he remembered the event fondly, and wanted to see some pictures of it later, but realised he hadn’t taken any when he later looked at his phone. If he’d had an AI-controlled camera setup in his home, however, and it was optimised to record family life, then he’d have had the record.
Zhang said he wanted UGREEN to redefine home security cameras, which are usually used to detect danger, and instead use them to “witness the joys of everyday life.” In addition, the smart home system can also perform all sorts of other features, such as telling you the location of your pet, when a package has been left by your front door, when your baby is crying, and so on.
I had a chance to play with the kit at IFA, and it appears to work really well. I used my voice to ask it to play some music on one of UGREEN’s smart speakers, and open the blinds in the demo booth, and it all worked smoothly. Amusingly, there was also a cat plushy on hand to demonstrate the pet detection features. UGREEN calls its AI agent Uliya, which is how you need to greet the machine to wake it up and give it commands.
UGREEN HomeAgent HA100
The heart of UGREEN’s smart home setup is the machine it calls a Home Agent. At the base level is the HA100, which was running in the demo booth. UGREEN says this has enough power to run all the core features of its voice-controlled smart home AI setup, and will be fine for most people’s needs. It uses a comparatively simple Rockchip RK3588 Arm chip, with AI processing power rated at 26 TOPS.
Take off the lid, and you’re presented with a series of bays, just like a NAS box (there’s also a 2.5Gb Ethernet connection on the back). There are two standard 3.5in hard drive slots for storage, plus another one dedicated to surveillance. Meanwhile, the green block at the end actually contains the core silicon that runs the machine. A display at the top tells you what the machine is doing, while also replicating your commands to show it’s understood you.
The whole lot is set up through UGREEN’s simple-to-use UGOS software, just like its NAS products. Importantly, it’s all local – it will still work fine even when it’s not connected to the Internet. This fills a neat gap in the market, where smart home products are dominated by big tech firms using the cloud, with all the concerns for privacy this entails. Until now, making a local, AI-controlled smart home setup involved faffing around with various bits of homebrew software, but UGREEN’s system is designed to be accessible to newcomers, and do the whole lot with one package.
This base machine is set to cost $1,799, but there will be an early bird price of $899 for those who pre-order the product. It’s due to launch on Kickstarter on 27 October.
Next up is the similar-looking HA100 Pro, which has the same style of white shell, but much more powerful silicon. This unit contains a CIX P1 Arm chip with 205 TOPS at its disposal, as well as a 10Gb Ethernet connection. UGREEN says this advanced model offers “deeper semantic understanding” of your commands, as well as a better ability to detect behaviour intent. It’s significantly more expensive than the base model, though, coming in at $5,999, again with a half-price early bird deal.
Finally, there’s the MasterAgent MA100, which UGREEN says it built in collaboration with Nvidia. Clad in black and gold, it’s equipped with an Nvidia Jetson T5000 chip, based on its Blackwell architecture with 2,560 CUDA cores. Rated for 2,070 TFLOPS of FP4 processing power, UGREEN says the MasterAgent offers contextual understanding of direct spoken commands, with seamless multi-device control, along with intent recognition.
You’ll need the big bucks for this top model, which comes in at $19,999, again with a half-price early bird deal.
SynCare cameras
UGREEN is introducing three cameras for its AIoT setup, encompassing two outdoor models (including a solar-powered one), as well as an indoor cam. The latter is called the SynCare Indoor Cam ID500 Pro, and it costs $149, with early bird deals bringing this figure down to $89. It offers a 4K resolution, as well as night vision and a privacy shutter. It can also pan and tilt to track movement, with UGREEN’s AI system giving it the ability to recognise people and pets.
Next up, the SynCare PoE Cam OD600 Pro can monitor the outside of your house. UGREEN had it set up with a perimeter demo. When you start to approach it, the unit flashes its lights and tells you you’re stepping on public property. Get too close, and the lights go red, while the AI system calls the authorities. Put it above your front door, and your AI smart home system can tell you when vehicles, people, and pets are approaching the house, with motion-activated night vision.
Three cameras are incorporated into this design, one with a 4K resolution, and two at 3K. The OD600 Pro has a price of $339, which will be reduced to $199 in the early bird deal.
Finally, the OD800 Pro takes the triple-camera design of the OD600, and gives it a 10,000mAh battery, and a solar panel to keep it powered without a mains connection. UGREEN says this camera also comes with both PIR (infrared) and radar detection, and it has a price of $339, reduced to $199 in initial early bird deals.
E-Paper Smart Frame
My favourite product on display at the launch was UGREEN’s E-Paper Smart Frame, which uses one of the latest e-paper screens, rather than a traditional LCD, to display your photos. I’ve seen a lot of digital picture frames in my time as a tech journalist, but this is the best one I’ve ever seen. The full-colour e-ink display looks completely natural, like a genuine photo from the good old days, and from any angle. At $439 ($299 early bird), it’s not cheap, but it does genuinely look really good.
Smart Speaker for Uliya
Finally, there’s UGREEN’s little smart speaker. It has four microphones built into the design for voice detection, and contains three small drivers in its chassis. It’s only rated for 5W of power output, but the sound quality is reasonable for a smart speaker. This is the cheapest product in the range, coming in at $99, or $69 with early bird pricing.
You don’t have to just use UGREEN with a HomeAgent system, though. The setup uses the Matter AI standard, meaning it can also cooperate with other compatible smart home devices, whether it’s a thermostat, robot vacuum cleaner, or home lighting system.
For more insight into UGREEN’s storage products, as well as its software, check out our NASync iDX6011 Pro review, where we take a look at one of the company’s six-bay NAS boxes.
