UGREEN Launches HomeAgent Local AI Smart Home Ecosystem With Privacy-First Design

UGREEN's new smart home platform keeps your AI and storage local, no cloud required

* HomeAgent merges local storage, AI, security, and device control into a single smart-home hub. * MasterAgent MA100 uses Nvidia Jetson Thor for heavy local AI, runs larger models and developer extensions. * Local-first design emphasizes privacy and on-device searches, while some cloud services remain optional. UGREEN is moving well beyond chargers, docks, and network-attached storage. At its Smart Living Launch Event at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, which I attended on Sept. 1, the company introduced HomeAgent, a new smart home platform built around local storage and AI processing. This marks UGREEN's first serious foray into AIoT, and the scope is broader than I expected. The lineup ranges from compact HomeAgent hubs to security cameras, a smart speaker, smart displays, and a much more powerful Nvidia Jetson-based system. UGREEN wants HomeAgent to become your smart home's local brain The HA100 combines storage, AI, security, and device control Close The HomeAgent HA100 and HA100 Pro are the center of the ecosystem and the products that make UGREEN's overall pitch easiest to understand. Instead of treating local storage, smart home control, and AI as separate components, HomeAgent combines them into a single box. Files, photos, security footage, and device activity can all be stored locally, while supported AI processing also happens on the device. UGREEN says the core storage, file management, security, and smart home functions can operate over the local network without a monthly storage fee. That matters because this isn't being positioned as just another Matter hub with a few extra features attached. The HA100 is designed to handle storage, security, computing, and device control together, giving UGREEN a very different starting point from companies that began with bulbs, plugs, or cameras. Matter support enables compatible devices to be integrated into a single system, allowing users to build automation scenes and coordinate multiple devices. It can also search recorded security footage using keywords, which is the kind of feature that makes local AI more useful than simply slapping an "AI" label on the box. UGREEN is also bringing its Uliya voice assistant into the platform. Uliya can control supported devices, check live status or event history, and create voice notifications for things such as a package arriving or a baby crying. The HA100 Pro takes that further with faster networking and improved AI performance, including advanced recognition, contextual device control, and voice-based automation rule creation. That's where the distinction between the regular and Pro models starts to become more meaningful than a basic performance bump. MasterAgent pushes UGREEN's local AI plans much further Nvidia's Jetson Thor gives the MA100 serious processing power The MasterAgent MA100 is where UGREEN's ambitions get much bigger. The company describes it as an agentic AI local hub built around Nvidia's Jetson Thor T5000 platform, with up to 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS of local compute performance. That's far beyond what most people would expect from a conventional smart-home hub, making the MA100 feel less like an accessory and more like a dedicated local AI appliance. UGREEN says the added performance will let MasterAgent run larger models locally, understand more complex context and intent, and coordinate multiple devices and tasks around the home. Developers will also be able to extend it with packages or skills. That developer angle is important because a box this powerful makes more sense if UGREEN can build a broader software ecosystem around it rather than limiting it to a fixed set of first-party functions. The rest of the announced hardware fills out the devices around those hubs. UGREEN showed the SynCare Indoor Cam ID500 Pro, SynCare PoE Cam OD600 Pro, SynCare Battery Cam OD800 Pro, Smart Speaker for Uliya, and UGREEN Gallery. Gallery includes LCD smart frames that can display photos and AI-generated highlight videos from a user's local library. Taken together, the lineup makes it clear that UGREEN isn't testing the smart-home market with a single standalone device. It's trying to launch the pieces of an ecosystem at once. UGREEN is betting that local AI can differentiate its ecosystem Privacy and useful automation are central to the pitch The part of UGREEN's strategy I find most interesting is that local processing isn't treated as a side feature. It's the foundation of the system. HomeAgent can recognize people, vehicles, pets, and packages, summarize events, surface unusual activity, and search through recorded footage. At the same time, the same platform can work with personal photos and videos stored at home. That's a much more practical use of local AI than simply adding another chatbot to a smart-home app. The part of UGREEN's strategy I find most interesting is that local processing isn't being treated as a side feature. There are still cloud dependencies, and UGREEN is explicit about that. Account registration and authentication, remote access, mobile notifications, software updates, and optional cloud-enabled services may still require an internet connection or cloud services. So "local-first" shouldn't be read as "completely offline." The important distinction is that UGREEN is keeping core storage, device control, and supported AI workloads in-home rather than making cloud processing the default for everything. The launch also expands UGREEN's existing relationship with the New England Patriots. The company named Patriots cornerback Christian Gonzalez its Global Brand Ambassador after becoming the team's Official Tech Accessory Partner earlier this year. "Just like UGREEN, I believe great technology should help people stay prepared, reach their potential, and bring their A-game in the moments that matter most," Gonzalez said during the announcement. Preorders for the HomeAgent HA100, HA100 Pro, and MasterAgent MA100 open Sept.3 through UGREEN's AIoT store, ahead of a Kickstarter campaign scheduled for Oct. 27. Customers can place a deposit of $50 to secure the Super Early Bird price, advertised at 50% off. Additional AIoT accessories are expected to join the campaign when it launches. The bigger question now isn't whether UGREEN wants into the smart-home market. It's whether this local-first approach can give people a reason to build around HomeAgent instead of adding yet another disconnected hub to what they already have.

Ugreen's new smart home ecosystem is built around local AI hubs - Engadget

Ugreen is stepping into the local AI market today with the launch of its smart home product lineup. At the center of that lineup are HomeAgent and MasterAgent, local AI-powered smart home hubs based on ARM architectures. Alongside three different home hubs with AI systems-on-chip, the company unveiled indoor and outdoor security cameras, a smart picture frame and a smart speaker at a Gillette Stadium launch event in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The goal is to provide smart features similar to those offered by products from Amazon and Google, but without sending sensitive user data to the cloud. An "AIoT" line represents uncharted territory for Ugreen, best known for products including fast chargers, USB cables and network attached storage (NAS) devices, but the company is differentiating itself with a privacy-forward approach. The HomeAgent comes in two flavors, with a more capable HA100 Pro model offered alongside the baseline HA100. The latter offers features including rule-based automation for home routines, categorical object recognition and home control through device commands, while the former builds more complexity atop those capabilities. In addition to object recognition, it can understand motion and infer behavioral intent, and it allows users to create automation rules with natural language voice input. The cheaper HA100 runs on an RK3588 platform with 16GB of LPDDR5 memory onboard and a combined 26 TOPS of AI performance, while the HA100 Pro runs on the more powerful CIX-CP8180(P1) SoC and doubles the RAM to 32GB, resulting in a 205 TOPS. The HA100 will retail for $1,799, with an early bird price of $899, while the HA100 Pro goes for a significantly steeper $5,999, or $2,999 with the early bird deal.

UGREEN's smart home hubs put an AI data center in your kitchen to protect your privacy

Depending on your needs, UGREEN's hardware can offer some seriously heavy-duty NVIDIA AI silicon. Smart homes are getting smarter, and that might just be a problem. While the idea of a more feature-reach, accessible, and proactive smart home sounds great on face value, the growing reliance of so many of these systems on cloud-based AI is making some shoppers think twice. UGREEN believes it might just have the solution in the form of some advanced smart home hubs. Ecosystems like Google Home tap into cloud-powered AI continually, from processing your voice input, to analyzing your Nest camera footage. Beyond obvious privacy considerations, there's also the subscription cost to consider with the more advanced camera functionality, to say nothing of storage. Rather than leaning so heavily on the cloud for those solutions, UGREEN wants to make all your smart home processing local. Everything from interpreting voice input to even watching all your cameras for package thieves can take place on one of the company's three smart hubs: the HomeAgent HA100, HomeAgent HA100 Pro, and MasterAgent MA100. All three offer the same basic setup -- in addition to controlling your smart home with support for Matter devices, and offering AI processing, each offers a 2-bay SATA NAS as well as space for a dedicated drive for video storage. The differences manifest as more and more capable AI processing capabilities, faster and more feature-rich local networking, and arguably the most shocking one here -- price. The base HomeAgent has 16GB of RAM and is capable of a rated 26 TOPS AI performance. The Pro ups that to 32GB, adds extra GPU and NPU processing help, and bumps that performance rating an order of magnitude up to 205 TOPS. You'll pay about $900 for the HomeAgent, and $3,000 for the Pro. Those are both a lot pricier than a lot of people are going to expect to spend for a dedicated smart home hub -- and this is before you even add your hard drives for storage. But then there's the MasterAgent. The hardware is undeniably slick -- its big claim to fame is that it taps into the power of NVIDIA Jetson Thor T5000 silicon for its onboard AI. Combine that with 128GB RAM, and some other upgrades like a 100Gbps PoE switch, and this is looking like a best-in-class solution. UGREEN wants $20,000 for it. That's a used car. That's a nice, big vacation. That's not the sort of cash any of us are used to dropping on a product like this. There's clearly a lot of potential here, and users could feel empowered to try out all sorts of new models on their beefy NVIDIA AI hardware, discovering new ways to enhance their smart home experience -- but with a hugely expensive bill of entry. The company intends to jump-start sales with some early-bird half-off deals, and with prices this large to begin with, that also adds up to some giant discounts. But if you miss that boat, UGREEN might just have its work ahead of it in convincing shoppers that this is a smart use for a sizable fraction of their salary. If you're curious about checking one out, you can get your pre-order in with a $50 deposit.

The first turnkey local AI-powered smart home hub is here and I'm excited

Cloud-based smart homes have been the norm for over a decade now. There are inherent problems with cloud-based smart devices though, with privacy being at the forefront of those issues. UGREEN just surprised everyone and announced the first turnkey local smart home hub that actually matters. UGREEN's HomeAgent combines local AI with a NAS, smart home hub and NVR A jack-of-all-trades Close I just spent the day previewing UGREEN's most unique product yet. Back in 2020, the company stepped out of the charger and mobile accessory market and entered an entirely new realm with the introduction of its NAS line. Since then, UGREEN has focused on expanding its NAS lineup with newer and more powerful models. In fact, UGREEN has become my go-to NAS brand, dethroning my love for Synology that has lasted for well over a decade. Close This week, though, UGREEN introduced something entirely new in its HomeAgent platform. Instead of just functioning as a NAS, HomeAgent is designed to be the central component of your local smart home. The entire HomeAgent platform is designed to be a local-first smart home system, featuring local video recording capabilities, local AI functionality, and local smart home control. You won't be locked into a single ecosystem Matter support extends functionality, but it's unclear just how far Close Alongside the HomeAgent platform, UGREEN is also introducing an ecosystem of smart home products compatible with its new system. There's an indoor camera, two outdoor cameras, a smart speaker, and a color E-Ink photo frame. These products are all made by UGREEN and are directly and natively supported within the HomeAgent ecosystem. For example, you can use your UGREEN smart speaker to trigger taking a picture with one of your cameras, and then have it displayed on the photo frame. While there are only four accessories in the ecosystem now, UGREEN does have Matter support within the HomeAgent platform and has commented that some form of Home Assistant support should be available before launch. Local control is more than about offline access Keeping your data secure is the most important part of the pitch Close UGREEN's HomeAgent platform is designed to be local first. Local AI, local video recordings, local everything. While many companies tout local AI, UGREEN is actually putting its money (or, really, your money) where its mouth is. There are three versions of the HomeAgent system -- the HA100, HA100 Pro, and Master Agent. Each model has a different amount of power it can offer, with the HA100 capable of running 4B parameter local AI models, the HA100 Pro running 32B parameter models, and the Master Agent capable of 122B parameter models. Close The problem is, the most expensive model, the Master Agent, which has 2,070 FP4 TFLOPS of computing power and 128GB of RAM, has a retail price of $19,999 (and a pre-order price of $9,999). It's prohibitively expensive, but it does offer insanely powerful local AI capabilities. The HA100 and HA100 Pro will retail for $1,799 and $5,999 respectively, with pre-order pricing starting at $899 and $2,999. Really though, the majority of people will be fine with the HA100 or HA100 Pro for their smart home setup. UGREEN's HomeAgent platform goes on pre-order starting today with the Kickstarter beginning in October. The only question that has not been answered yet -- and won't be able to be answered until the system starts shipping -- is: does anything actually leave the HomeAgent platform or does it stay 100% local? UGREEN claims that this is a local-first platform, but we won't know for sure until actual hands-on testing happens. Local-first smart homes are a necessity of the future In a world where an internet outage can make your smart bed stop working, a local-first smart home is definitely something that needs to be considered and worked on. Home Assistant does this, but it also can be a fairly complicated system that the average person isn't very likely to dive into. I'm very happy that UGREEN is pioneering this stage of smart homes, and I am very intrigued by what the HomeAgent platform brings to the table. Truly locally run AI and locally controlled smart homes are the future, and UGREEN just might be the company to take us there.

Ugreen's 'HomeAgent' is a local AI smart home ecosystem for its new line of cameras, more

Ugreen might be most well-known for its chargers and device accessories, but its recent announcement might push it deeper into the smart home space. The company announced a local AI hub called the "HomeAgent," alongside Ugreen's new smart cameras and more. With every mention of AI, there's a little bit of unease that seems to follow. Beyond the damage it's done to the price of anything tech these days, it also stirs privacy concerns. But a locally run AI model carries less risk, right? Ugreen's HomeAgent HA100 and HA100 Pro are new local AI smart home hubs that task themselves with controlling smart home devices within the ecosystem using models that run all on-device. Think of what Google Home does with AI image and event detection, but run all of it off the cloud and in a hub that sits inside your house. The HA100 and HA100 Pro operate on your local network to handle a few tasks. The most obvious is summarized events happening around your home. Like Google Home allows with its add-on packages, the HA100 hubs can generate descriptions of what took place in front of your cameras, recognizing people, pets, and vehicles within that footage. The hub will also proactively generate image highlights with the photos it has access to in its library, displaying them on Ugreen's smart photo frames. Ugreen says the HomeAgent hubs have Matter support. They are reportedly able to have unified local control over other devices on the network, acting as a new entry to the smart home ecosystem list. The company also announced a set of devices that will immediately work with HomeAgent. There are three security cameras that cover indoor and outdoor needs. The Ugreen SynCare indoor camera has a pan/tilt base with 4K image capture and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity. Ugreen is clearly trying to pose its new devices as a more secure alternative, considering the indoor camera comes with a physical privacy shutter. The SynCare PoE and Battery Cams are the two outdoor models. Both capture three video feeds with a "bullet" camera and a pan/tilt module for more coverage up to 9x hybrid zoom. The main difference between the two comes down to power delivery and placement requirements. The battery-powered option uses a solar panel to charge, but it may not be as quick to respond as the Ethernet-connected model. Ugreen's new HomeAgent line launches with the HA100 and HA100 Pro, new SynCare cameras, and several other smart home today, available for pre-order.

Forget Alexa -- UGreen wants you to use its new local AI assistant to control your smart home

Be honest: Even with the advent of Alexa+ and Gemini, how often do you use those voice assistants in your home for something other than turning on the lights and listening to music? UGreen is launching its own smart voice assistant as part of a new smart home ecosystem that could help alleviate two emerging concerns of consumers: ever-increasing subscription prices and cloud-based AI that knows too much about you. Called the UGreen HomeAgent, the system is centered around a local hub, which not only acts as a traditional NAS drive, but also serves as the brains of your home, helping to analyze security camera footage, photos and videos you've backed up from your phone. It can also listen for and react to things happening in and around your house, and then automatically activate smart home devices based on the situation. And, it can even create highlight reels of videos and photos it captures of you and your family around the house. Tying it all together is its assistant "Uliya," which will let you control everything using nothing but your voice. I had a chance to check out UGreen's new HomeAgent at a preview event on September 1. Here's a rundown of all the components, and what they can do -- and the eye-watering price of its top-end devices. A smarter NAS hub At the core of everything is the hub, which is essentially a NAS drive with AI. UGreen will offer three versions, the HA100, HA100 Pro and the MasterAgent MA100, each with greater capabilities -- and prices. At the starting end is the HA100, which will provide the basics, such as storage, smart security, and basic smart home control and object identification. Stepping up to the HA100 Pro gives you more advanced AI capabilities, so it will not only be able to identify more objects and things, but also be able to discern what they're doing. In addition, users will be able to create smart home automations through natural language requests, similar to what you can now do with Alexa+ and Gemini for Home. The MA100 will blow past the HA100 models with far greater capabilities, such as the ability to run larger models, provide much deeper understanding about the events happening in your home, and developers will be able to create additional skills to augment the hub. UGreen's AI HomeAgent and smart speaker The company's local AI, called HomeAgent, will be able to recognize people, vehicles, pets, and packages, surfaces alerts for unusual activity, summarizes events, and enables keyword search across recorded footage. The sophistication of the AI you get is dependent on the hub you purchase. For example, if you get the base model HA100, it can recognize dogs and cats as pets, but it can't distinguish them as either a canine or feline. It also can't recognize if someone is running, walking, or jumping, only if they enter, leave, or linger. Beyond that, it will also create highlight reels from events it records on your local cameras, but also be able to respond to such commands as "Show last year's ski trip on the TV," "Where's the dog?" and "What happened at the front door?" You'll be able to interact with UGreen's AI through the company's smart speaker, by saying "Hey, Uliya" (pronounced YOU-lee-yah). The speaker, which is about the size of the Amazon Echo Show 5, will cost $99, but can be preordered for $69. Security cameras UGreen is launching three security cameras: two outdoor cameras and one indoor camera -- that will record video locally to the home hub. The SynCare Indoor Cam ID500 Pro ($149; preorder for $89) is a 4K pan/tilt camera not unlike what you'll find from TP-Link or Wyze. It can rotate 360 degrees and tilt 111 degrees, can automatically follow people across the room, and has Wi-Fi 6. UGreen's two outdoor cameras -- the $159 SynCare PoE Cam OD600 Pro, and $199 SynCare Battery Cam OD800 Pro -- both have a single 4K camera and dual 3K cameras, with a wide-angle lens and then a pan/tilt camera below. The PoE camera has Motion-Activated & Starlight Night Vision, while the Battery Camera has PIR & Radar Detection, as well as a solar panel to help keep its battery charged. Digital Photo Frame Once UGreen has backed up all your photos, how best to display them all? The UGreen Gallery digital picture frame uses a 13.3-inch eInk Spectra 6 display with a resolution of 1600 x 1200 -- the same as used on the Aura Ink, one of the best digital photo frames. It connects via Wi-Fi, but can also be outfitted with a 512GB microSD card, so you could presumably load more photos onto the device. However, it's not meant to rapidly cycle through images. The photo frame will cost $299 in preorder, and $439 later on; that's similar to other E-Ink photo frames. Smart Home functionality UGreen's hub is Matter-compatible, which means that homeowners will be able to integrate other smart home devices, and then create automations and routines, which can be activated automatically or via voice command. At launch, HomeAgent will work with a number of Aqara devices, such as the Aqara Camera Hub G5 Pro, Aqara Doorbell Camera Hub G410, Eve motion sensors and dimmer switches, and GE Cync LED light strips. Outlook UGreen's home-based AI means that any processing of personal information, such as videos and photos, is done locally, rather than in the cloud. That means that the images of you and your kids won't be exposed to any training models, or risk being compromised. And, because it's done locally, you also won't have to pay recurring subscription fees to save video in the cloud -- a requirement of many of the best home security cameras and video doorbells. Likewise, as the hub can also act as a backup for your phone, you can ditch cloud subscriptions to Google, Samsung, and Apple if you want to save all your precious memories. UGreen is not alone in this approach. Earlier today, Anker announced the MindBase, a similar central hub with a built-in local AI that will be able to analyze security camera footage and control your smart home devices. Of course, the time it takes to recoup those costs will be years, once you add in the price of not just the UGreen hub, but also the hard drives and other accessories. Even the least expensive hub costs $899, and that's before you equip it with any storage, which itself is rocketing in price. Given the rising costs of subscriptions, though, that break-even point may come sooner rather than later.