ProKNX announces the release of the Aragon Maestro smart speaker, steering the smart-home market into the next generation of AI-driven Personal Assistants
ProKNX has announced the release of its new smart speaker, Aragon Maestro, a high-quality smart-home assistant with many new features that significantly enhance its overall capabilities. The Aragon Maestro puts offline home automation control on a whole new level with the on-device addition of AI-driven personal assistance features. This world-first represents an important advancement in voice control for home automation.
ProKNX has built on the success of their previous Aragon Master smart speaker. The next-generation Maestro retains all its predecessor’s essential features, including on-board Node-RED and remote connection, coupled with a host of new AI-driven personal assistance features that function on-device.
CEO of ProKNX, Christian Kiefel, stated, “We feel that it was essential to develop a fail-safe smart speaker that functions in all situations, even in areas of poor connectivity. The Maestro’s independence from the Internet allows the users reliable and secure control of the smart environment. This infallibility is of the utmost importance in use cases where the device is giving autonomy to disabled people, or to seniors living alone.”
A reworking of the speech-to-text technology of the Aragon Maestro now means that the assistant understands complex queries without need to be trained on set vocabulary. This is due to the integration of an on-device LLM (Large Language Model). This allows the unit to be easily adapted to a wide variety of specific user requirements, a necessary feature in smart solutions for senior- and disabled-care, opening up the sector to OEM for integrators or companies looking to offer bespoke smart solutions.
ProKNX has also made significant improvements in the Aragon Maestro’s capacity to understand wake-words and commands. The hybrid text-to-speech on-device system of Kaldi and Whisper technologies augment the capability of the smart speaker to understand commands, even in noisy environments. As an additional feature, a to-do list can now be generated on-device. Although independent of cloud functionality, the list can be accessed remotely through an encrypted point-to-point remote connection.
The Aragon Maestro has been developed to be interoperable with a wide variety of standards. The product is primarily able to control KNX systems, however any IP can be supported with some development. This facilitates the addition of the smart speaker into a large range of intelligent environments from private homes, to residential facilities, offices, and hotels.
The Aragon Maestro smart speaker is currently available for the English language, with a progressive release in Q3 of French and German models.
For full information on the Aragon Maestro smart speaker: