Nucleus Intercom system — makes your home smart

Video calling is a great example of a technology that once felt highly futuristic but is now available on nearly every computer and smartphone out there. FaceTime, Hangouts, Skype — there are plenty of options, and they all work pretty well, and work in pretty much the same way.

A new company called Nucleus thinks that there’s still a lot of room for improvement in video calls, particularly in terms of connecting people instantly. That’s the goal of its new product (also called Nucleus): it’s a tablet you can mount on your wall or place on a counter that lets you connect with other users in less than a second.

Nucleus Intercom devices spread around your home, it’ll work as a modern intercom device. You can just say “call the living room” and a video and audio feed from the designated space will pop right up in less than 200 milliseconds. To make things this speedy, the Nucleus actually sets up a mesh network in your home, similar to the technology Sonos uses to speed data between multiple speakers. You can also use the 8-inch touch screen to make calls, but the Nucleus team talked up its voice recognition features — they cited the usefulness of just being able to talk to the Amazon Echo as a comparison.

The Nucleus team is taking privacy into account — you can’t just automatically call any room in your house that has a Nucleus device with impunity. You can set auto-answer by device, so you can always get a hold of the living room while keeping one in your bedroom set to private, for example. There’s also a low-tech but clever solution to the idea of having a camera pointing in your room at all times — the Nucleus is designed so that you can physically flip the camera around so it’s pointing at the wall if you want to make sure no one can see into your room.

As for when and how you can get your hands on a Nucleus, the company is opening up pre-orders today for $209 — $40 less than the $249 price it’ll go for once it formally launches next year. It’ll be a while before the devices get into the hands of people who pre-order — the company is targeting a spring 2016 release.

The Nucleus team says its done the research and found that plenty of people are interested in having home intercom-style systems that cost a lot more than Nucleus — whether or not that spells success for this new hardware remains to be seen. If it sounds like it’ll be useful to you, pre-orders are open now.