Piccolo Brings A Gesture-Based Assistant For Smart Homes

Amazon, Google, and Samsung have all had a big market share and presence in the voice assistant and smart assistant market. These assistants have focused heavily on voice assistant technology, but now, with the Vision Assistant from Piccolo, you can have a smart assistant without needing to speak to it. Rather than voice activated, the Vision Assistant is gesture based! #softwaremagic

Once the Piccolo camera is placed in your home, all you need to do is point towards your smart devices and the app does some skeletal tracking to understand your movements. Below is a video demo from their website and it looks promising for those who are less talkative! 

If the tech works as intended, you could simply point towards your TV and it will turn on, wave your hands to fast-forward on Netflix and so on. Gesture commands have been in the collective imagination since Kinect, but the Vision Assistant seems to be fulfilling that promise.

The team behind the Piccolo does not want to replace Alexa as your main assistant but rather work alongside it. However, as TechCrunch reported, for the Piccolo to work you’d basically need to connect it to every smart device you own. It sounds good in theory, but the developers will have to create support for each device you connect.

If the developers succeed, this could be a really interesting addition for any smart home. We’ll keep you posted on their developments!