UEI Expects First Nevo Butler Smart Home Hub to Reach Market by Year-End

Nevo Butler from Universal Electronics Inc., a smart home hub with built-in voice assistant, is due on the market in late Q4, said CEO Paul Arling at a Wednesday virtual investor conference. The company said last month a “leading telecommunication service provider” signed on to be the first customer for the platform that includes UEI’s QuickSet Cloud and Nevo.ai interoperability as a service (see 2002210018).

Arling credited QuickSet for customers’ ability to maintain business in what he called an “uneven” year for installations. “We have some customers who have not really fallen very much at all,” he said, saying those who had a fully implemented QuickSet system in place last year weren’t as affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid social distancing, those companies were able to provide a “quick install” by a technician, or subscribers could self-install a cable system that was delivered to them.

Do-it-yourself customers followed on-screen instructions after connecting the set-top box to a TV. The QuickSet platform reads information from the device, pings the cloud to identify the box and then “blasts out the information to configure everything.”

Systems capable of implementing QuickSet can take a year or longer to design and build, said Arling, who expects more to reach the market in Q4 from existing customers redesigning their user interface and architecture. Those who began working on them pre-COVID-19 are getting “closer to implementation.” He also referenced new customers using UEI products for the first time or coming to the control market in "a different way,” he said. The QuickSet interface bridges live TV with subscription video-on-demand, he noted.

Arling said Nevo Butler works “with Alexa and other home assistants but will also fully power your AV system.” Voice control assistants on the market are “somewhat capable of doing that,” he said, “but they can’t get complete control because there are devices out there that we make the original remote for” that aren’t capable of voice enablement.

Even if some existing set-tops can be voice-controlled, “they’re two-way RF, not IP-enabled,” said Arling: They wouldn’t be controllable by existing voice assistants for AV functions, “but they can be by Nevo Butler or a product that utilizes our QuickSet technology.” Nevo Butler doesn’t answer informational questions such as “How tall is Mount Everest?” which Alexa and Google Assistant do; it focuses instead on home control. Hospitality is also a target market.

Arling wouldn’t quantify the potential market size for Nevo Butler, saying demand can vary significantly from customer estimates with first-generation products. The margins for Nevo will be similar to UEI’s advanced products at “average or above average.” The average selling price for a Nevo Butler is “multiple” times the cost of a remote control, he said.