Mozilla Things Gateway for Smart Homes

Mozilla offers a slick solution to smart home automation.

21:28 12 February 2018

Mozilla has launched a new service called Things Gateway specifically designed to simplify the operation of a house full of connected sensors, outlets, switches and bulbs. It is an open source home automation control solution built based on transparency, openness and respect for user privacy.

 

Things Gateway, which is built to run on the Raspberry Pi, is ideal for homeowners who do not want to be locked in to one company’s ecosystem. The service supports more kinds of connected devices manufactured by different firms and has the ability to make the process of integrating devices and protocols easier. It also now offers built-in if-this-then-that functionality but does not rely on IFTTT. Recipes are created and run right into the Things Gateway’s rules engine without any data passing through a third party’s system.

 

Mozilla’s voice assistant works the same way as Siri, Google and Alexa. However, unlike the three voice assistants, the former responds to spoken command without transmitting any speech data to any third parties. A Mozilla spokesperson said that “processing occurs on Mozilla servers using our own speech engines,” adding “the user’s voice never leaves Mozilla servers.”