With Smart Home Hub Coming, UEI's QuickSet Helps During Pandemic: CEO

Universal Electronics Inc.'s Nevo Butler smart home hub with voice assistant is due on the market in late Q4, said CEO Paul Arling on a Wednesday investor call (see here and here). "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 hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid social distancing, those companies were able to provide a “quick install” by a technician or customers, or customers 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,” the corporate chief said. Even if some existing set-tops can be voice-controlled, “they’re two-way RF, not IP-enabled,” said Arling: Those boxes wouldn’t be controllable by existing voice assistants for audiovisual 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 Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant do; it focuses on home control.