Evey: artificial intelligence in your home

It's 6:45 a.m. The bedroom curtains open, loudspeakers start playing music, and the ceiling lights come on gradually. An artificial voice is heard: “Hello Maxime. I woke you up 15 minutes earlier this morning, traffic is heavy. Your first meeting of the day is at 9:00. I've already started brewing your coffee, it should be ready soon."

Waking up with Evey is a bit like waking up in the future. Evey is an artificial intelligence integrated into a small tablet placed on the wall. It is equipped with several sensors – cameras, microphones, etc. – and can control most connected objects in a home, such as TV, wireless speakers, connected appliances, thermostat and lighting.

The device, which is still at the prototype stage, is a creation of Evey Innovation, a young company affiliated with Centech, the incubator of the School of Higher Technologies (ETS). “I had the idea for Evey five years ago, but we have been working on the project for two and a half years”, explains the president of the company, Kaeven Martin, met in his offices.

Connected homes are one of the hottest trends in new technologies. It's a market that's currently mostly limited to gadget-loving early adopters, but could explode to a value of US$53.45 billion a year by 2022, according to research firm Zion Market. Research.

The objective of Evey Innovation is to be at the heart (or rather at the head) of these houses. “We made a brain for smart homes. We believe this is the element that is currently missing for them to provide a good user experience,” explains Kaeven Martin.

In its current form, Evey allows you to control more than fifty brands of devices with your voice, on a mobile application or on the small tablet directly. The real interest of technology, however, is its artificial intelligence, which learns from our habits and automates our routines. For those familiar with the Iron Man franchise, Evey is reminiscent of Jarvis, the virtual assistant who helps Tony Stark with his various household chores.

The potential of these automations is huge. Evey can thus analyze that a person listens to the TV at a certain volume only in the evening, when everyone is in bed, and modulate it accordingly. She can also notice (thanks to her camera) that someone likes to make their coffee when they get up, but that their partner takes it more about thirty minutes after waking up.

“Evey is not going to make any adjustments herself,” warns Kaeven Martin, however. When the intelligence learns, it can offer the user to adapt if this automation has already been planned (“do you want me to make your coffee 30 minutes after you wake up?”), or send the data back (anonymous) to the company directly, if it is a new behavior. It is then up to Kaeven Martin and his team to decide whether this behavior will be added to the assistant's repertoire.

“We want Evey to make homes more comfortable and safer,” explains the president. If we feel that a new behavior looks intrusive or dangerous, we don't add it. »

Even if Evey notes that a person always turns on their connected oven on Saturday morning, it will therefore not automatically do so for them afterwards, due to the risk of fire.

How it works

The Evey personal assistant is based on several different technologies. The device is a real small tablet designed and assembled in Montreal, which is installed in a conventional switch box. “In 90 to 95% of homes, the switches are well placed and offer a view of the entire room,” explains Kaeven Martin.

Evey is powered by the Android operating system and integrates several sensors, such as a light detector, a microphone, a camera and an infrared camera (to distinguish faces at night).

When the device launches, likely next year, a scaled-down version with just the sensors will also be released, to extend Evey's range around her home without blowing up the final bill too much.

Interesting detail, the cameras are completely isolated from the operating system, and work with an independent processor. "It's a matter of security and privacy," says Kaeven Martin. A bit like with the fingerprint readers of smart phones, the system therefore does not have access to the image itself, but can only know if a person is in the room or not, and who this person is.

A hacker could therefore not have access to the images filmed by Evey, nor even his development team, for that matter.

This is not the only precaution taken to respect the privacy of users. “All recorded data will be accessible to the user, who can modify and delete them,” promises Kaeven Martin.

The list of technologies needed for a device of its kind to work well is long: voice recognition, text-to-speech, language recognition, deep learning, integration with connected products.

How did a team of ten people manage to accomplish all this in just two and a half years? “We do a lot of integration, using technologies developed by others,” says Kaeven Martin. A team of 10 people could never create their own speech recognition technology. »

Does it really work?

A functional prototype of Evey is installed in the basement of Centech in Montreal. You can interact with the device, pretend to be woken up in the morning and control the few gadgets installed for the occasion.

At first glance, the tablet itself is understated and elegant. “We wanted it to be invisible, but beautiful when you look at it,” notes Kaeven Martin. It succeeded.

Automated device control works as expected, but voice commands felt finicky during our visit.

If it is a problem with the microphone or speech recognition (identify the spoken words), there is nothing to worry about, but if it is the understanding of language that is lacking (identify the intention behind what is said), that could be more problematic. Because after Siri, Alexa and Google Home, consumers are now used to talking to their assistants in a natural way, and not using a limited number of predefined commands.

A big question remains, however: can Evey really learn in the chaos of a house? In the company's offices, posters of famous artificial intelligences decorate the walls. Will Evey be reminiscent of the smarts of the movie Her, or will she have the efficiency of a 1990s automated telephone system?

This is the question that Evey Innovation will try to answer over the next few months. A controlled test will be carried out in early October in an uninhabited condominium, and other larger-scale tests, in real homes, will then be carried out in early 2018.

Evey Innovation should also complete a round of financing soon to ensure that it can complete this next step, assemble a team of 25 to 50 people and start manufacturing the final product. The company is supported by Deloitte for this step.

If all goes well, the personal assistant should hit the market next year. It only remains to see what his IQ will be.

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