homeOS Overview, Matter 1.4.1, & Smart Garden with Bird Buddy CEO Franci Zidar!
01:01:51 Share

Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of HomeKit Insider. I am really excited this week. We have another very fun guest. It is Francie, who is the CEO and co-founder of BirdBuddy.

Which we have talked about on the podcast multiple times because I reviewed the Bird Buddy camera bird feeder like a year ago. And then just last week, we talked about their new Kickstarter campaign. So we're going to go through the news this week. Then we're going to talk about AI in kind of smart home aspects. We're going to talk about the smart garden and different accessories there. And we're going to talk about...

Bird Buddy, Wonder Blocks, their pedal camera, all of those things. So, Franci, thank you for hanging out today. Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here to go through the news together and also to speak about Bird Buddy. I know, and I don't know if you knew this. So, you're in Slovenia, right? Yes, right now I'm in Slovenia, although I am all over the place, as my job requires. Okay.

Did you grow up in Slovenia? Yeah, I did. I grew up in a small village, basically, by Slovenian standards, which is a super small village by any other standards here in Slovenia. But yeah, I've been gravitating towards, I guess, US culture, market, media, and all that stuff since a kid.

I love it. So I guess Ohio has a very large Slovenian population, especially up in Cleveland. There's a whole community of them. There's a community center and everything. At Ohio State, where I went to college, there was a whole Slovenian group, and some of my best friends were the leaders there.

of that organization. So we grew, I like went through college with nothing but a ton of Slovenians, um, you know, bring in all, we would, we would drink and he would bust out his accordion. Uh, he would, um, we would do shotski all the time. He brought his own shotski to college. Um, amazing. I know. And there's even, I guess, um,

That's called like Prislava, which is like a large Slovenian summer camp, I guess, here in Ohio that they all go to in the summer. And I actually – I used to work as a corporate magician and I went and performed there during the summer. Sounds like a fun job. Yeah. So many random things. So like when we were setting this up and they're like, oh, you're in Slovenia. I was like, oh my gosh, I love it. I love it. So –

Let's get into this. Let's talk about the news. First up, just a quick plug. I did another video...

Came out on, I think, Wednesday or Tuesday last week for everyone listening or watching this, covering all of the news about Home OS that we know so far. This is Apple's upcoming, basically, operating system that would run on its smart display. So a lot of the system requirements and things that we know about it, just to give you high level, but you guys can all check out the video. It's going to be based off of tvOS. It's going to be running on Apple's new smart screen. There's debate on whether Home OS will, you know,

replace tv os on apple tvs we'll also see things like um

We've already seen many things that kind of will show up in Home OS very likely, like the screensaver interface on Apple TV. That looks perfect for a smart display, especially with the time on there, because this display is also going to react to where you are. You're going to be across the room. It's going to show a screensaver and the time. Then as you approach it, it'll dissolve away and go into your widget view and stuff. The recipe screen in the new news app. That's perfect for this. Lyric view, standby mode. All these things seem just perfectly destined for Apple.

Apple's new smart home display. It's of course going to act as a home hub, as a matter hub, as a thread border router. It's going to have Apple intelligence in Siri supported on it. It's going to have widgets,

But Gurman over at Bloomberg says there will be no App Store at launch, which is a bummer because there's a lot of really great smart home apps they would have loved to see on this display, but apparently won't be supported on Home OS at the beginning. And then there will be some form of people recognition, not just by voice, but using a built-in camera to recognize people even from behind likely onboard AI processing to do some of that stuff. So a whole bunch more in that video. If you want to check it out, it is linked in the show notes.

We also saw that iOS 18.5 is going to be released likely today, if you're listening to this on Monday when the podcast comes out. Nothing new for the smart home, but I will say, Vision OS 2.5 still does not support vacuum cleaners. Nope. They still show on the home app, but you can't do anything with them. So just putting that out there.

Ecobee, their smart video doorbell has been updated. They've updated their doorbell to now support Google Home. So previously supported HomeKit, not HomeKit secure video, just HomeKit. Now it has Google Home on there as well. So that's nice. If you are a Google Home user and specifically listening to the podcast and we're like, man, I really listened to this Apple smart home podcast, but really want that Google Home news, I'm delivering it for you.

Now to get something I think you'll be able to help Francie with. I wanted to rush through those topics because we have so much to talk about.

Arlo is improving its monitoring system by adding a bunch of new AI capabilities. And BirdBuddy has been doing this. I don't know what kind of AI you guys were originally using for bird recognition on the bird feature, bird feeder, but now you've done a bunch more. So Arlo is adding new event captions. So they say it'll transform how you review footage with concise, accurate AI descriptions of those events.

There's video search, quickly locate and review critical moments by searching for keywords and descriptions or time frames, which is huge. I love being able to like search your past for, you know, a car crash or whatever it is that you're going to search for in your camera history.

There's new video detection for fire. So it'll actually use AI-powered notifications to alert you when a fire or a flame is detected. And there's audio detection adding scream, gunshot, dog barking, and glass breaking. So a bunch of new AI features here. You know, what do you make of this, and how has your experience been with adding your own AI features? I think it's...

It's kind of an obvious path for any camera and microphone product. I think it's... I look at BirdBuddy effectively...

from an imaging point of view, almost like a sensor at this point, right? Because it's so much more than just capturing frames for you to look at, like a video in an Arlo or whatever other home security camera, right? Or BirdBuddy or any other camera product. It is really kind of the past couple of years of advancements in AI have made it so that each frame is basically a source of data, right?

And it is, you don't need like a smoke detector to your point, right? Or some other specific type of sensor to detect something specific going on. You can just look at things and interpret them. And I think that

This is just scratching the surface. It's impressive what they're doing. And I think it's really commendable that it's happening so fast, but it is really the amount of value you can extract from every frame or like a sequence of frames for so many different use cases is just kind of getting wild, I guess. And because this is, we're not yet at a point where it's kind of commoditized, like this technology where it'd be like super cheap and super accessible, right?

You still have to make some investments on a company level, but yeah, I think it's impressive and I think it's just going to get a lot better as time goes by. BirdBuddy really started out as we built our own models to start. I think one of the really beautiful things for a crowdfunded business is that you have a huge community you can lean on.

And what we did was very early on, we sent out hundreds of cameras to our early backers to put in their bird feeders to get photos from that point of view. And we started building our own model from that data set. So it was very rough, but it worked. And it's now a lot more sophisticated using the more recent large language models from these huge companies.

Out of curiosity, and I'm getting ahead of myself for, you know, actually interview things, but how have you felt like using AI as, like I've talked to other, you know, journalists about it and even consumers, and it's almost like just AI is being used too much, like as a buzzword. Originally, you guys had like, you know, bird detection and you could identify which one, but you didn't really tout it as AI. Now I do see that you're using, you know,

Yeah.

issues. So, or I should say the biggest potential issues from a consumer point of view, looking at a brand, right? And one of the two, I forget what the other one was, but one was the use of AI, like as just saying AI or talking about AI as it relates to kind of your product, right? Because

There's a lot of, I guess, trepidation at this point about what the technology is and what it does and how it works and what its kind of ultimate manifestation is. So I think there's some concern there. I think...

the direction we've been going in with BirdBuddy and trying to more clearly say this is AI, is to just emphasize the value. Because it is expensive to run AI models. A lot of the stuff we're doing is not cheap and we try to make it as affordable or free because the baseline detection at BirdBuddy

in the BirdBuddy app is still free, right? If you buy a BirdBuddy product, you get AI for free, right? But there are a lot of things where we want to go deeper and we want to add a lot more value to our customers. And AI can do that in really tangible ways and exciting ways, right? And that's where I think calling it AI is

kind of makes it a bit more explicit to our customers and users that this is special and valuable, right? I guess that's, but it is a very kind of hard balance to walk right now, right? I would prefer us calling things by the value that they create versus just saying AI, putting it in an AI bucket, right? Because fundamentally, and even going back to the comment around like each frame has a ton of value, right?

like technically it's ai right but the customer doesn't care right the customer cares that there's a fire in their house right so it's it's a fire detection system right not like you can call it ai but effectively it's something more specific um so yeah okay good to know okay we will come back to all that stuff um let's keep going with the news sonos and ikea have you seen these sonos and ikea speakers that they have put out in the past

I've seen Sonos and Ikea. I don't know if I want to share that story, but a friend of mine had like a Sonos branded Ikea speaker that nobody could connect to like four years ago or five years ago. So I've never seen one after that, but it was a bit of a, you know, like a joke, I guess, in my friend group as far as that's not working super well.

Which one was it? Because there are three that were launched. So these are all part of the Symphonisk line. And there was the bookshelf one that was kind of like just a big rectangular block that could also mount on your wall as a little shelf. There was the one that acted as a lamp. Was it the lamp? Yeah.

It wasn't Lamp. It was like a more elongated, I don't know, smaller one, IKEA Sonos. Yeah, I don't know. I have no idea exactly of the type. I can try to Google it. But yeah, it was definitely an IKEA Sonos speaker. Yeah.

Well, the last one that I remember is the wall one that was like a picture that you literally had like a fabric on the front. And my cat is running around chasing something behind me right now. What are you doing, Bowie? Get out of here. Okay. Anyway. The last one. Symphonisk. Sorry. The bookshelf one. That's what it was. I think that's the one. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

The Bookshelf one. I thought that one was really nice. I've had all three of these Symphonic speakers, and I've always thought they worked well because they were AirPlay, and they had the Sonos tech on the inside. Well, I guess none of that really matters because they are dissolving the partnership. They will no longer be co-producing products together.

Uh, the statement that we have is that, uh, over the past eight years, we've had the pleasure of working closely with Ikea and are proud of what we've achieved. Um, this is from Sonos, uh, spokesperson Aaron Patagas. Um, although our work together was largely wound down and we won't be releasing new products as partners, we'll continue to support every existing Symphonic product to customers so they can keep enjoying great sound in their homes for many years to come.

I do believe that because Sonos supports their products for a very long time, and these do support AirPlay, so even if Sonos abandoned them, they should still work with AirPlay. But I'm a little bummed. I thought they did some really neat stuff. The fact that the one could be mounted as a shelf on the wall, the others could be pictures on the wall, and the other ones could double as lamps, I thought was smart. But...

I don't know. I mean, well, I don't know which, uh, what problems their bookshelf one was having. I think it was, uh, I think at the time we all had Android, uh, phones. Uh, see, that's the problem right there. Probably. That was a problem. Yeah. And then I think the Bluetooth didn't work and then whatever, it was just really awkward because we were at a party and nobody could really make that thing work reliably. You needed somebody to come out with an accordion. Yeah, pretty much like our part. That was, yeah. Yeah.

Okay, the next major news this week, Matter. The CSA has announced the new version of Matter. This is our big spring update because we get two updates of Matter every single year. We get one in the spring and we get one in the fall. And the CSA says they are going to continue with that biannual cadence. But there's a big asterisk this time. They are now differentiating between major and minor releases.

And every year we will get either a minor and a minor, a minor and a major, or a major and a major. Some combination of major and minor releases. And this version is not Matter 1.5 like we hoped. It's Matter 1.4.1. And it's a bit smaller than, you know, many would have expected. We're not getting any new device types whatsoever.

or really features, but it will improve things like the setup process, which I'm sure you know how important setup flow is to keeping your customer happy. Basically, the three major things now matter is adopting NFC setup, so you can just tap on it to pair and go through the certification and onboarding process before you'd have to either enter a code or scan a QR code. Apple did support that with Apple Home. Some like the Wemo ones, you can literally just tap them

good to go. But now Matter does this too. There's multi-device setup, so if you're getting a pack of like, you know, three or six smart bulbs, you can now set those all up at the same time. You scan one QR code and it'll onboard all of those bulbs. You can name each one, they'll flash, put them where you're going, and

All of that make it very easy. And then finally, they now have terms and conditions acceptance during that setup process. So if you are trying to do things like comply with GDPR and you need like user acceptance on something, you can now show those terms and conditions during the commissioning process versus having to require users to download a manufacturer app and

to do that. So makes it a little bit easier to get things on board. So really refining the, the, the onboarding process. They say there are bug fixes and improvements though. Nothing super specific about that. I don't know if I'll see about your experience with matter and any of that, but these all seem like good things to help make it easier. Right? Yeah. I mean, uh, whenever you're standardizing something to make it more accessible for people to use, uh,

as a part of like different platforms, I think that's important, right? Yeah, I think it's great to see kind of these companies coming together and sharing, right? In kind of connectivity, I guess, right? So you can actually create something that is a bit more bespoke to your household and don't have to be completely tied into a single ecosystem. That's not a bad thing. I know, and I actually thought it was, so planning this out, I'm like, man, we're going to have BirdBuddy on and we should be getting our Matter release online.

Very soon. And for anyone who's been following along with the show, Matter 1.5 has been rumored to contain a ton of smart gardening things. I'm like, wow, this is gonna be perfect timing. Francis is gonna come on and we're gonna talk about smart garden stuff.

with bird buddy and then matter 1.4 0.1 drops with, with none of that in there. So I guess those rumors of things like being put into 1.5 are definitely still plausible, but that could be, that might be the release we get at the end of the year. Maybe we'll get 1.4 0.2 at the end of the year and 1.5 will come out next spring. Um,

To recap what we were seeing for 1.5 from a variety of sources like the GitHub repo as well as CyberMod Studio on Twitter, but really focusing on garden and water management, irrigation system, soil sensors, this thing I want to ask you about, a bunch of partners like Rocio, Gardena, Nordic Semiconductors, Puzzle Labs,

The new devices that have been so far referenced in the code include irrigation systems, pergolas, shutters, screens, gates, floodlight cameras, intercoms, garage door. There are chimes, snapshot cameras, soil sensors, cameras, video doorbells, barriers, blinds, and more. So I am very curious at what, what are those will actually come out and you know how they can be integrated into products like this.

So I am bummed. I don't know how much you've been keeping an eye on Matter since you're kind of in that space. I think more so in the context of trying to make the user experience, especially as it relates kind of to onboarding and connecting BirdBuddy and our products to their kind of smart home ecosystem as easy as possible, right? So we've yet, I guess, to look at kind of more broader interaction between BirdBuddy and other devices.

That will for sure change and it's changing with pedal, right? Because that's kind of a key, I guess, inflection point where for us, but I'm going to go back to my kind of, I guess, claim of how much value there is in each frame of a video, right? I think, and this is also something that Tesla did very early on, right? How,

They started removing LIDAR sensors and all that stuff from cars because their assumption was you can do all that with vision. And I think that there's a lot you can do with vision. But having said that, I think that, again, extremely important to have these open standards to be able to kind of tap into.

And to create like this interconnectability of these different systems, I doubt we'll ship sensors, kind of soil sensors or anything like that ourselves. So I think this is actually perfect for us, right? Because we can leverage other people's

kind of systems and platforms and just kind of use them as a value add, right, to the platform that we're building. And they can do the same for us, right? So yeah, for sure, I welcome these things. BirdBuddy will for sure invest in making our products more open and more kind of interoperable

We are still, I guess, I don't want to say too small, but as far as the team's focus, we're still very much focused on trying to make the core customer experiences as powerful as we can. And all of these things take resources, so we have to pick our battles.

Awesome. Well, we have so much to talk about. I want to talk about the Kickstarter and Wonder Blocks and the pedal camera and AI and other smart gardening things. But before we get into talking about nature, I should take my break and let's thank our sponsors for the episode, which I'm literally basically repping. I had to wear like a nature shirt just for you, Francie, with my tree line on here because I really wanted to talk about fast growing trees, which is the

biggest online nursery in the U.S. with thousands of different plants and over 2 million happy customers. They have all the plants your yard needs, like fruit trees, privacy trees, flowering trees, shrubs, and so much more. Whatever plants you're interested in, Fast Green Trees has you covered. You can find the perfect fit for your climate and space. You guys have heard me talk about it. I love the fact that you can put in your location, and it tells you your zone and what is...

what is around your area, what will actually grow where you are. So you're not going to throw a bunch of money at a tree or a bush that is not going to thrive where you are. I was able to put in my location. I'm like, oh, cool, zone six. And I could pick out the exact fruit trees and bushes and boxwoods and everything else that made sense for where I am. And so far, everything is doing amazing. I was funny. I was looking through my photos yesterday trying to find a product that I was reviewing. And I saw the photos of like the last

fast growing tree that I purchased showing up the large cardboard box is like six feet long inside was a tree that was just the tested all up and it looked all nice. I planted in the ground added some fertilizer and now they are thriving. They are all doing amazing out there. I have little cherries coming in. I'm so excited for cherries on both of our cherry trees this year. I got apple trees. I have pink lemonade blueberry bushes which are like blueberries but they're like a pinkish you

color, like a lighter color and they're like sweet and tart. And I'm so excited, especially since my son will not stop eating blueberries. It's a problem. How do you make them stop eating blueberries? They eat so many. So yeah, you can do all sorts of stuff besides fruit bushes and trees. You've got your boxwoods and other flowering shrubs and trees that you can plant to make your house look beautiful. So definitely go check them out this spring. They have the best deals for your yard up to half off on select plants and other deals.

Listeners to our show get 15% off their first purchase when using the code HOMEKIT at checkout. That's an additional 15% off at FastGrowingTrees.com using the code HOMEKIT at checkout. FastGrowingTrees.com, code HOMEKIT. Now's the perfect time to plant. Use HOMEKIT to save today. Offers valid for a limited time, terms and conditions apply.

We also have Nord layer today, which is very fun. It is a toggle ready network security platform for modern businesses. It combines a bunch of different things like VPN access control, threat protection into a single easy to use platform.

There is no hardware, no complex setup. It's just really easy to do. They have step-by-step onboarding and 24-7 customer support to help you go. It works with your existing setup in all major platforms like iPhone, iPad, Mac, all of those things. Even Windows users get counted in there.

You can easily scale adding users, features, and service with just a few clicks, including having SSO and provisioning. So just super easy to do. And it applies to basically anyone who is inside of a business. Business owners, it's just ready to go. Toggle-ready network security,

Bye.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you to both of our sponsors.

Now let's get to the fun stuff. So, Francie, let's – I already talked about the new Bird Buddy Kickstarter campaign in the last episode. I want to hear you give me your pitch on the new campaign, what you guys are bringing out. Totally. Yeah. I think it's two things, right? One, like Bird Buddy was built –

as a or started as a crowdfunded campaign right with uh people really passionately kind of getting behind us uh to build a product that helps them connect with nature to appreciate kind of the beauty of nature that's around our home and i think we took that really seriously and um kind of importantly

set ourselves a pretty tall, I guess, goal to try to help people both kind of continue to connect in a more deeper level with all the nature around their home, but also give back. If you ask our customers, if you ask anybody that feeds birds around their homes, actually why they do that, they will almost like unanimously say,

not because I want to see birds or bring kind of birds into my back. I mean, that's, that is a reason, but the top reason is because it makes me feel really good to give back. Right. And it's one of the kind of, it's a rare chance for you to feel like you're actually doing something to help wildlife and nature from, from your backyard. Right. And just filling up a bird feeder with some,

seeds and going to work and looking or seeing it disappear when you come back home is really rewarding. It's this weird, weird, special feeling of something was here, something ate, right? And I fed something. So anyway, all of this to say that Wonder Blocks are really kind of fundamentally in that direction, right? It's a system that helps people make a difference from their backyard. We are, we continue to kind of evolve it and refine it

but all with a mission to help people make an impact from home, right? Pollinators are on a major decline. Monarch butterflies have had like a 90% decline over the past 30 years.

the American bumblebee is almost extinct in most states in the US. And the list is pretty large as far as, you know, small, important creatures that are kind of suffering because of rapid urbanization and use of pesticides and all that stuff. So, you know, it's relatively easy to be a positive influence or have a positive impact from around your home, but it's

easier if you have a product you can just buy and use it, you know, and it kind of does that for you. So that's what Wonderblocks fundamentally is, right? It's a way for anybody to become like a bit of a conservationist in their backyard, right? One of the kind of slogans for the campaign was conservation starts in your yard, right? And it's something we borrowed from Doug Tallamy who wrote this beautiful book called Nature's Best Hope. And it's, yeah, so that's fundamentally where kind of that system is.

came from and what inspired it. But because, you know, if one pillar for BirdBuddy is kind of really helping people feel good about doing something good, right?

The other part of it is really appreciating and noticing nature, right? And that's where Pedal comes in as almost kind of a general purpose nature camera for your yard, which you can put anywhere you want. So it's a flower bed or a tree or in the bushes or, you know, just on the ground.

You have this interchangeable macro and wide lens, which means that it can both serve as almost like an observer, right? Then you put it out there and it'll detect all the nature that's there, all the different plant and animal species.

create a list and help you kind of connect and engage and understand what lives in your yard, right? And then the macro lens or the macro mode effectively allowing you to get close and get kind of these beautiful shots of these small creatures like bees, butterflies, bugs, and really get close, right? And kind of the main design challenge for Petal is how do we make it

super simple to use, to interact with, right? Because we really want to encourage our customers to kind of explore, right? And to find these beautiful spaces and these beautiful little creatures or plants in their yard and to help them connect in a more kind of meaningful way. So yeah, and fundamentally,

Bird Buddy serves as a platform that we're building these kind of new ideas on top. And we're really trying to bring people closer to nature while also giving them tools to help nature thrive. I think that's kind of the shortest I can answer that question.

It is a lot. It is almost kind of like nebulous because it is such a modular system. Yeah. Like, I mean, you can take pedal and put it into your regular garden and just use it as a regular camera there. Yeah. You could also mount it to – you can get a wonder block habitat situation from below. Yeah. And it has like a –

an art metal or something that goes on the top. It's called, it's technically called trellis. I've learned. There you go. It makes sense. You can attach things to the trellis between like the butterfly habitat, but you can also attach like the pedal cameras and everything. So it's a really cool setup, but yeah, it's a little nebulous to try to,

Exactly. I mean, clearly it's connecting because you guys have raised quite a bit so far on Kickstarter. I think over $2 million or something maybe at this point. So it's been doing very well. But like they're two separate products that can also be used together, which is really cool. And I think one of the areas that I'm excited to kind of see how you broaden out is how you also –

look at the gardens as well. I'd love to see how you could use that same, like if I had that above my strawberry garden, you know, I'd love to be able to get alerts. I'm like, Hey, you know, how, how is your garden doing? What does it need? Because like you said, you can use AI to, to figure things out just with video. Yep. Totally. And I think that's, so to me, uh, that is, uh, one of the more exciting kind of next steps for a pedal, right? Um,

is really because i'm a i want to say like i'm a novice gardener right i really enjoy it uh i have strawberries i've uh i've had tomatoes and they've also died but anyway so uh you know you try your best but you know what time allows and so on um yeah so the opportunity to have a uh

like a guide, right? Like an AI guide effectively that helps you understand what's happening with nature. And especially in a garden setting, right? Where it's important that you catch disease or pests, right? Or, you know, just know when to prune or do something else that requires some knowledge. This is something that I find extremely compelling because I think you can add a lot of value. And then there's like another aspect of that

which I'm also super excited about is like imagine having petal in a vegetable garden, right? And you can see all of your produce, whatever it is, right? You can have a couple, they're pretty affordable and small, right? And it's kind of easy to, let's say, cover like a larger area with that as well. And then you have this digital clone of everything you're growing and the status, right? And is it ripe or is it, you know, has some infestation or something like that?

But also because you have this digital clone, it's something you can share. Right. So fundamentally, I'd love to share my digital clone of my vegetable garden with my neighbors and for them to share it with me. Right. And for us to then be able to kind of exchange our crop. Right. Because we both know that, you know, yeah, like my strawberries or whatever will be ripe in two days. Right. I'll have a ton. I'm not going to eat all of them. Right. And you could kind of create like a bit of a marketplace situation there. So anyway, like this is

This digitization of nature, I think, opens up so much opportunity for creative interaction and community that it just feels like such a massive unlock. And that's why Petal, to me, is such a beautiful project. Because it really... Getting people to put camera and point it at nature, one, everybody really cares about the nature around their home. So you want to do the best you can by it. You want to

take good care of it. You want it to be beautiful, right? So having something there that kind of unlocks that and gives you the best possible advice and kind of alerts you of important moments and things like that is super important. But then, yeah, when it comes to, you know, regular vegetable gardens, there's like a whole nother source of or universe of value, right, that you can kind of create from that.

Yeah, I agree. You touched on it a little bit already. And one of the things that I really wanted to pester you on is that soil sensor. Because, you know, you already said you wouldn't make one, or at least right now, that's not a roadmap of what you want to do. But what I'm like, so say we're making a lot of assumptions here, but say Matter 1.5 adds soil sensors that can measure, you know, acidity, it can measure humidity.

Uh, nitrogen, it can matter the hydration level, all of these things. And of course I could use those for something as simple as, as watering, like cool. The water's dry, turn on the sprinkler. Like that's a basic automation I could do with some of these other accessories that I want to talk about. Um, and yeah, it's, it's a thing.

But what I think is unique about a bird buddy in this situation is that you are already doing so much AI analysis with the cameras and with the rest of nature going on. I feel like you guys would be in a really great position to take information from a soil sensor, whether it's one you create or one that you partner with,

to give you the most robust picture of nature and your garden between the pests that are there. Like, Hey, your strawberries have been eaten by birds. Look at them. Or you have aphids on your plants or the leaves or the leaves are turning yellow. Here's why that probably is using information from the sun and the soil sensor. So what,

looking at soil sensors to give you more information that you can't because you can't really, you can know a lot from the plants, but there's even more you can get with that data from the soil. And you can use, then use like your cameras to identify the plants and know what they should have, all that stuff. Would you try to go a route of just partnering with someone or would you go the more open route of adding matter support where you're able to

read any matter soil sensor. What would your thoughts be? A couple of thoughts on this. I don't have direct experience with soil sensors and any product basically that is in this specific category. But having talked with people at BirdBuddy who have experience with that and some other people who are from the industry, the current, I think,

status of things is that they're not super reliable. And that if you want to make them super reliable, other than maybe just kind of, I guess, you know, humidity sensor, right, or something really, really basic, supposedly, they're pretty expensive, if they're really good, and kind of lasting and reliable. But that's that. So I'm not an expert on that. And I don't know, but that's what I've heard. And that's also why it's not something that I spend too much time on. Having said that,

Obviously, I would love for our products to integrate with others both ways, for us to be able to tap into that data from other sensors, but also for people to be able to tap into data from our products. But I think one thing that's really... Because that's where I get really excited about everything you can do with just vision, is you can pretty reliably measure...

kind of hydration level of plants based on reflection from leaves and the ground, right? So you can see something, you can kind of assess the current state of things also from just the way plants look and how they trend over time, right? And also you can take on in other inputs as far as temperature and sun, right? And kind of general weather conditions to assess how much water something needs.

If it's a sprinkler system that somewhat changes things, but also not completely, but if it's a human being watering plants, right? A camera sees that, right? The camera sees you go there and water it, right? So there's a lot of stuff you can infer from images. And I think that our goal for sure will be to try to do the best job we can, right? With just using audio and image as a kind of an omni sensor, right?

For more specific use, for more precise use, for things that we just can't know like pH and some other things that are also really important. That's where sensors become super important and maybe even critical to some degree. And in that case, for sure, we will rely right now on partners and people that are already building that.

there is also an opportunity for us to do something ourselves, right? But we're not an expert in this field and I think it'd be almost easier for us to partner with a company or maybe even like acquire a startup, right? That's kind of working in this space. If that becomes something that clearly adds a lot of value to our users, right?

Very cool. I know how you guys are doing, I think, a lot more AI stuff than even the AI companies. Like my grandmother made me get this app that I point at my plants and it tells me things. And she was so adamant that she gave me like $30 cash so I could buy the whole yearly subscription because it's going to be so useful. It's going to save my garden. And –

While there are some things that it can do, there are other things that it can't. I literally showed it my tomatoes that were suffering from blossom rot, which is where the tomatoes start to rot from the side that are connected to the vine. Once they start that, they're toast. Even if you salvage tomato and cut off the rotten part, the tomatoes themselves are very mealy and grainy, and they're awful. There's nothing really you can do at that point. You just have to solve the blossom rot. This is one of those things where I have...

done some research and there's a ton of it's like oh too much of this it's too much water and it's washing out nutrients or it's not enough water so they're struggling with this and

The best thing I can see is people talking about just some of the sensors in the soil. So using that app, I took it, and literally the first time it told me my plant was fine. And I'm like, I beg to differ. And then the second time, it didn't give me anything specific. It was like, try watering more, like something generic. And I'm very, very interested at...

You guys being able to leverage that AI to help people be more successful there. I know you guys are focused on nature and not gardening specifically, but I think it's just that holistic view that you guys are kind of expanding into that would be really, really interesting to me. On top of just nature,

monitoring nature. Yeah, and I think that, just to add to that, one small point, right? I think what's super important is behavior over time, right? So that app, you take one snap, right? And that's all it knows. And maybe then you add one snap, like in a week, right? But having a camera there that takes, let's say, 100 or 200 snaps a day, right? What's super important is to see the trend, right? And then over a couple of days, you know that it has a disease, but you might not know that from a single image. So, yeah, I think that the big and important thing is to have a persistent...

sensor, be it like video, audio, or like a soil sensor right there that can really infer important things from a series of data, not just like a single data point, right? Yeah.

Since we're talking, you know, on Apple Home Podcasts, have you ever thought about adding something like Apple Home support to your products? Now, for the existing Bird Buddy, I have a cat climbing on my lap. We're talking about birds. He was interested. For the existing Bird Buddy, I get it because it is a Wi-Fi camera and Apple's requirements for that are pretty strenuous. And even if you're using a solar panel, you're

The power requirements are a lot. But I believe you have some sort of new hub, right, that you're launching with Petal. And I feel like there would be the possibility of adding something like Apple Home integration. I know it's not...

We're not using a pedal as a security system at all, but I feel like it would just be fun to have a live bird feeder view or a live pedal view of my garden alongside the other views from my house. Would that be something you guys would ever consider? Yeah.

Yeah, totally. So we currently have Alexa integration, right? Where you can pull up... You have a beautiful cat, by the way. Where you can pull up... Where you can pull up... So images and live stream, right? From everybody's camera. And you can get like a daily recap broadcast on your Echo show devices and so on. And we...

I think that's about the extent of it. But there's, so the way I see, and we've had this presentation about a year ago, I think, where we talked about a concept of a nature-connected home.

which strikes really close to me, right? Because if you have, and I have a kid, I have a four-year-old, right? That I really want to have a sense of nature connectedness, right? That understands like his place in the world. And there are all these beautiful things around us and also around our home. And having that,

sensors, having cameras, you know, being able to broadcast bird songs into your home, like live bird songs, right, into your home is something that I find it

extremely compelling as a user, right? I really want that for myself. I want it for the world, right? So us going in a direction of more integration with home systems, you know, be it Apple or Alexa or Google or whatever is definitely something I'm super excited about and I will definitely keep building in that direction. And Petal,

will be a major kind of contributor to that experience. Right. So, yeah, you know, you can already broadcast images to TVs, but we're not yet we haven't yet done that for Apple or Google. We started with Alexa because I think it has the largest, you know, kind of penetration on the market. Right. And we're still a relatively young company. Like we started shipping in 2022. Right. So it's we've now shipped

half a million units in the past couple of years. So it's been quite a, quite a, you know, intense ride, but we still have to, as I mentioned earlier, kind of pick our battles, right? Where do we launch something has to make sense financially and resource wise. Well, here, here's my low hanging fruit request, right? This, this you could do, and I would like it. I would like to ask like, you know, Apple assistant, like,

How was my garden for the day? Or how was the activity on my bird feeder? And have that integrate through shortcuts because that's a much lower bar of requirements. And then your install base is literally anyone on iPhone and iPad, which is very high. It would be a really easy thing to do, and it would just be really fun. Yeah.

Actually, I would love to be able to say like, you know, in my good night scene through Apple Home, I could say good night and it's going to go ahead and lock my door, do all this. And then it could also pop up and they're saying your garden did great today. You have tomatoes ready for harvesting tomorrow.

Like something like that. Like why it could easily do that, you know, run that, um, the Siri shortcut through the actual app, get a summary AI summary, just like you're kind of doing, uh, already. And then put that into a little prompt that shows up on the screen. Very easy to do. Uh, I'm pretty sure an intern could do that. Uh,

do it. That would be great. I would love it. That's, that's a really good point. Yeah. I think so. The way I usually look at kind of these integrations is more so nature kind of reaching out to you versus you kind of prompting something. Right.

So to me, but you're absolutely right. I think that there are definitely low-hanging fruits that we could and should explore and will explore. But to me, one of the more exciting use cases is there's this rare bird at your bird buddy. Or there's a deer.

in your yard or something like that. Go check it out. So there's a way for nature to almost reach out to you and ask you to go look at it or to tell you something. But yeah, shortcuts do sound like a good shortcut.

Um, I do want to, can you give me a little bit of a high level on what your hub is, um, and how that is working for AI and privacy and things like that? Is it a requirement? Is it like optional? Give me a high level on that. So, uh, the hub is, uh, really meant to provide, uh,

Mostly for privacy, right? So there's very little interaction between your bird-body devices then and the cloud, right? Most of the AI inference for the kind of core species detection goes through the hub. The storage is local, right? So you get all the images.

and videos stored locally, you don't have to rely on the cloud for that. It's a performance thing, right? So it's faster because it's local just by default, right? So you don't have to go to AWS or whatever infrastructure you're using, right? You can go straight through kind of your local compute system. And then I guess lastly, definitely not least is, and this is something we're not yet 100% sure on the standard we're going to use, but

a lower bandwidth Wi-Fi, right? Which unlocks the range effectively. So our products live outdoors, right? And especially as it kind of relates to bird feeders and gardens and so on, you might want to put it quite a bit away from where you would normally kind of require coverage, right, for Wi-Fi.

And having a lower bandwidth option, which our products will kind of conform to, is definitely a major advantage. So longer range, better performance, and more privacy, I guess, is where I would kind of summarize it. Okay, very cool. And it would easily allow Apple Home support because you would have a local hub that you could check in with. Yeah, just going to keep focusing on that part there. Yep.

So the new, the, the pedal cameras themselves, they can all, they, they charge up, right? And then you can also use a solar panel. Yep. So every pedal camera comes with a solar panel. You can charge it up via USB-C. And I think one of the coolest, well, yeah, probably one of the coolest things technologically about pedal is that it uses a

I can't speak to exactly the company we're working on with on that, but it uses a very low power kind of cutting edge chip, like an IC chip.

for the full stack of things it needs to do, right? So effectively we're cutting power draw down like by 80%, right? And can do like really fast wake-ups and do edge AI. So basically you can do a small, you can run small models on pedal, right? And pedal is really tiny. So it's really high performing in a lot of intense ways, right? Or like ways that kind of delivers a lot of value, but in a very low powered way.

But I guess the main piece

pieces, just this camera system with an interchangeable lens as far as how the users will interact with it, where you can put it wherever you want. And sun is great, so the solar panel keeps it charged probably indefinitely in really most use cases, more so than BirdBuddy because this is really a much lower-powered device. But on its own, it should have roughly six to eight weeks of autonomy just on a single charge.

Wow. Yeah, that's really good. I was going to ask if you're using a new solar panel, like technology at all, because I know the one of my so the bird buddy is really cool. You got a bird feeder, you have the actual camera that mounts on the inside. So the birds come up the E and they get you some on camera. And then the roof of the bird feeder, half of that is the solar panel. Okay.

But I live in Ohio, which means we have a lot of weather. So like mine keeps getting down.

Even with the solar panel here in spring when it's been raining for the last several days, my bird feeder is down to like 10%. It's like, oh, we can't send you postcards anymore because the level is too low. So I didn't know if the efficiency has improved on newer version of solar panels that you're using. I think it's going to be roughly the same. But I think that the main efficiency comes from the unit itself, right? Gotcha. It is...

It's kind of wild how efficient these panels are already. It's about 20% gets converted into usable electricity. So it's already pretty good. But the current BirdBuddy camera module...

is a lot more power hungry. But it's also like in many ways, it's much more of a, I don't know, it reaches a higher level of performance for what it needs to do. Because like one of the things that, and this is maybe like a small thing, but it's an important detail. You have a bird feeder, right? And so if you were really kind of diligent in refilling your bird feeder, you can really get, I don't know,

100, 200, 500 birds visits a day, right? And so BirdBuddy's kind of core way of working is that it has to try to wake up like so many times, right? And that really is power consuming. Whereas Petal, you know, if you put it out there and it's really kind of looking for that special moment and it's doing time lapses and doing kind of more so a interval type thing, it's a much less, you know, just by the way it works, it's a much less consuming device.

That makes sense. That's very cool. I still really like the bird buddy. And we talked about this, like even before we started recording, I didn't even, so I checked my bird buddy quite frequently, but I would just randomly checked it this morning when I was charging, like, Oh, I should check for firmware updates while I have it plugged in. And, um,

Apparently, I can just update the firmware and I could go from – I was originally filming these little bird videos in 720p and now there's like a 2K option and a higher frame rate option that you can – that you're here just enabling like years later after I installed this thing with the software update. It's crazy. Yeah.

Yeah, it's... So the hardware is pretty powerful. That's Onbird Buddy, right? It is... We've kind of over-engineered it at the beginning because we had a really short time frame to get to market because we launched on Kickstarter and it was such a huge success. And...

We put in everything we thought we might potentially need to make it work. And some of that really meant we, so we have effectively two chips that one of them could probably do all the work, but we have two chips to make sure right at the time. And a side effect of that is that we did not squeeze out all the power that, you know, hardware really enabled at the beginning, but have,

I guess now done that maybe since mid 2024 yeah that has been available probably since summer 2024 which is 2k mode right and used to be 1080p max now it's 2k and then also higher frame rates yeah

It's very cool. I was just talking on literally last week's episode, I think, how I got annoyed that a lot of manufacturers were just underpowering so much of their stuff because consumers don't know. So they can cheap out on processors and chipsets and sensors because they don't know that they're going with the cheaper one. And then it bites them in the butt years later when they're not supported. And here you are.

years later, just adding higher resolution video and frame rate. So it's, it was like shocking to see that that was just a thing that was added through firmware. So I love it.

Okay, let's wrap this out. We've been talking for a while. I want to finish up just by talking about some of our other favorite smart garden and nature devices. I have a list of some of mine. Do you have any other kind of smart outdoor accessories that you like that whether they help you garden, maintain your lawn, connect with nature, anything like that?

I don't. Yeah, I honestly don't. So the only thing I have outside is a smart home security system. Right. That's about the extent of it. Yeah, I probably should. But I don't. Yeah. Maybe me being the CEO and co-founder of a growing business has something to do with me not being able to play with things like that. I'd love to, though. Yeah.

That's true. You need to start playing with some more. So you know which ones to start integrating with bird budding to make it even more capable. Well, I still have a list anyway. And one I didn't even know existed. This cat is still chasing a spring somewhere around the floor. Anyway, I've recently started checking out Otto, like OTO. If you've seen this thing, it seems like it's a very similar audience of just like

people who care about the outside and especially a great in like smaller areas where you don't have to have like, you know, a massive yard or anything to be able to use it. But it's like this smart gardening system that like,

3D points where the water should go. You can go up to, I think, like 40 feet away or something, and you just plug this into your hose, pick, you can draw on, like, the app where your garden is, and it'll just go and water your lawn, water your trees, your bushes, whatever you have. It looks really, really cool.

No HomeKit or MatterSupport yet, but this is still on the tops of my list of things to try out. I think it looks really, really neat. Of course, Eve Aqua has been a standby for me. I use this to water my gardens now. I made a whole irrigation system with this with PVC tubing, and I run it with that, but there's no soil sensor, so that's the extra piece that I'm missing here. But apparently Maris also has an Apple Home-enabled watering system, so that's even cheaper than

That's really neat to see. But the Eve Aqua one is the red, which is nice. For my chickens, I have a chicken guard, which is a door that is solar paneled and it comes up and down and lets them in and out. It lets them out during the day and lets them in at night or closes, locks them in at night so they're safe. Really, really helpful. I love that thing. By the way, it's Slovenian company. Sorry to interject. There you go. See? I know the founder. They are –

There you go. I love it. They do – it is such a – I got the extreme one too, which handles like the really low temperatures and stuff. And we rely on that all the time. I mean aside from the fact that I don't want to go out there and like let them in and out and stuff at night. But like my mother-in-law who has chickens, she has to stop what she's doing to make sure her chickens are locked up so that a mink or something doesn't come out after sundown and try to get them all. So like I'm so happy that I have this –

security system for my chickens, which is super helpful. So had that for years, still going strong and I love it.

Eve Degree, just a great outdoor sensor. And then Atatmo Weather Station. This is another one. This would be a perfect one for you guys to integrate with if you want to track. I mean, you're already doing it all with cameras, but they do have like the wind sensor and rain sensor and all those gauges as well as things like humidity, temperature, all that stuff, air quality for outside equipment.

And they make that data really easily available for other things. But most of it is shown in Apple Home. Things like temperature or the wind and the rain don't because those sensors are not accessible in HomeKit yet. But they are being added to Matter. So maybe Natatmo will update it to do that. But that's been my favorite weather station that is easily compatible with Apple Home. So...

If you're looking, Frazi, for some other things to expand your smart garden nature preserve in your backyard, there's some suggestions to get you going. These are great. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for joining and talking about all this. What do you want to leave us with? Do you want to tell everyone where to go to learn more about BirdBuddy and Wonderblocks and Petal and all that stuff? Yeah, totally. First, I really appreciate you having me. I love talking about this stuff. I love the growth in the area of kind of outdoor smart devices. I think it's extremely underserved, right? I think indoors is very commonplace.

kind of developed already, but outdoors is kind of getting there. But yeah, so we are live on Kickstarter right now with Petal, the Smart Nature camera and Wonderblocks. So you can go there and support us if you want. If you want a bird buddy, a smart bird feeder or a hummingbird feeder, you can go to birdbuddy.com

It's a beautiful product. It brings a lot of joy to you or your family or your loved one. It's a great gift too. So that's it. I will just say, even if you don't have a lot of time or don't...

that have the inclination to really kind of i don't know buy wonder blocks or whatever because these are you know you have to it's it's a little bit of a commitment right plant native flowers right plant native flowers around your home uh it's a really small thing you can do and it's a really important thing you can do to help uh nature uh thrive and help create pollinator pathway uh and help uh you know do a little bit of uh kind of a positive impact right from your yard

Awesome. I love it. Thank you so much. I feel like we could keep talking. We could talk forever about the conservation and the nature aspect of things. We didn't even talk about the red and extra connectivity options. So maybe we'll have to do another one of these down the line. Thank you so much for sharing.

hanging and joining today. Everyone else, you guys know what to do. Please give the podcast 510 100 star rating on your podcast player of choice. You can see the video version of this and see me get started multiple times by this new cat that is running around.

YouTube.com slash HomeKit Insider. Everything we talked about today is in the show notes, including for the Kickstarter for Wonder Blocks and Petal, as well as Bird Buddy, so you can check that out. I am very excited about the hummingbird feeder. I've tried to put a hummingbird feeder in our front window, and occasionally we will get them, but I never seem to actually see when they're there. And...

that would solve that, solve that whole problem for me in two seconds. So, um, I love it. Thank you everybody again for listening and we'll see you guys in the next episode.