If you’ve never heard of the smart home as a service space in the internet of things market, you’re certainly not alone; nobody outside of the professional space may have any reason to know about that particularly niche submarket in an already niche market, or one of its key players, MiOS, but Intel and Amazon might just change that with what they plan to show off this year at CES. MiOS has been around for some time, allowing companies creating IoT gadgets to make their processes easier by providing a backend for both development and continued support. MiOS has always been featured as the server to its customers’ nodes, so to speak, with IoT devices using its services “phoning home” when necessary for updates, support, and other network functions.
Intel and Amazon have leveraged MiOS in a pretty amazing way by putting it onsite to run the show from a specialized box, and will be showing off the result of that at CES in the form of a “tiny smart home”. The whole kit and kaboodle runs from a tiny computer box with an Intel Quark processor inside, and uses Amazon Alexa and Amazon Web Services for all of the voice control and automation functions that it needs to make the home around it work as it should.
MiOS won’t be running its first such rodeo hand in hand with Intel and Amazon at CES; a previous incarnation of the tiny smart home, with a similar box, was shown off in November. That particular version included IoT gadgets from big names like Philips, Nest, and Sonos, among others. Naturally, an Amazon Fire TV was there, along with Amazon’s Echo, Dot, and Tap. There isn’t much information as yet regarding just what this version of the tiny smart home will hold, but if it’s anything like the last one, the central box onsite running MiOS on Intel’s silicon will tie everything in the home seamlessly together, providing a compatibility layer that allows Amazon’s Alexa to do its thing, and all of the various bits and bobs to use Amazon Web Services as a backend.