Honeywell Wants You to Talk to Its Thermostat Like it’s A Friend

by Joshua Gulick — Tuesday, January 07, 2014, 04:50 PM EDT

The Nest thermostat may have entered the market several steps ahead of its more established competition, but those days are behind it and the likes of Honeywell have some classy, Wi-Fi-enabled thermostats with some tricks of their own. The latest is the Honeywell Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat, which the company is showing off at CES 2014.

Honeywell Wi-Fi Thermostat, which competes with the Nest.

The feature that caught our attention is the voice control. Say “Hello, Thermostat,” and the device is ready to take your verbal instructions. You don’t need to use stilted ‘I’m talking to a machine’ speak, either: just say something like “Make it warmer,” or “Make it much cooler,” and it complies. Honeywell servers handle the heavy lifting (the thermostat connects to them via your home network, hence the “Wi-Fi” in the name) to decipher your commands. Of course, it also has touch capabilities and apps for Android and iOS.

Oh, and here’s something interesting: your five-year-old probably can’t cause as much havoc with the thermostat’s voice commands as you’d expect: the device tends not to hear the high-pitched voices of young children.

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Tags: Nest, honeywell, CES2014, Smart Thermostat

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.