🚀 Our journey

Recent breakthrough in AI has made it possible to reimagine what Ambient Computing can do for a Smart Home. Two major examples come to mind with many more right behind them:

🏠 Home Security
It is no longer necessary for humans to constantly watch security camera video feeds. Modern AI is advanced enough to tell us when there is something concerning to look at, such as uninvited guests near the house.

👪 Capturing Family Moments
Occasionally there are fun moments around the house that we can't capture because noone is holding their phone ready to record. And by the time we grab a phone the moment is ruined because of the disruption. Here again, modern AI can help by detecting laughter and recording the episode for the family album.

COVID19: Remote Home Care
COVID19 isolated at home many of us, including our elderly or handicapped family members. Not being able to check on them regularly in person elevates the risks that they are exposed to such as falls, abnormal eating patterns, medication noncompliance, reduced physical activity, flooding, gas leaks, fire and others.

🔥 Why now

In the summer of 2019 I got excited about the new generation AI enabled smart home systems and ordered several to play with. The possibilities seemed endlessly inspiring. Affordable, programmable, all great!... Until I hit an avalanche of consumer privacy reports and government penalties aimed at the companies making proprietary systems, storing, keeping and using personal data in unethical (sometimes illegal) ways. That was not cool.

So I looked around for Open Source alternatives, which don't hide their behavior behind marketing promises wrapped around legal gibberish. It turned out that there are a lot of buildings blocks available and with a little contribution to the ecosystem, we can achieve a state of the art open source AI powered smart home solution.

After a few months of contributions to the roadmaps of existing projects, the unique needs and opportunities became clear. The Ambianic mission crystalized and an agile product roadmap was born.

💖 Why sponsor?

Hope the background of this project resonates with you. If you chose to donate, your money will go mainly towards product development. Support this project if AI, privacy and local control are important to you. More specifically:

• You find it important to have full transparency and control over AI that runs in your home or office.
• You want true end-to-end audit-ability that doesn't rely on trusting a proprietary box and fine print legalese.
• You want full control over your data: how its used, when its used, where its stored.
• You want visibility into each and every action originating from AI inference.
• You want full visibility and control over every packet sent over the network with your data.

How Ambianic works:

• Ambianic consists of two main components: Ambianic Edge and Ambianic UI.
• Ambianic Edge is the core AI flow engine deployed locally on your edge device. Ambianic Edge continuously observes inputs from sources you configure such as light sensors, motion sensors and cameras. It then alerts you when it detects new ambient patterns. For example it will notify you via Ambianic UI that an unknown person was detected near your home. Or it may notify you when there is a memorable family moment with your kids laughing out loud in the living room.
• Ambianic UI: Progressive Web App that provides centralized user control over edge deployments. This is the app where you will receive alerts, approve follow up actions and review interesting events in your home timeline.
• Ambianic runs and stores data ONLY on your own devices and backup servers. No obscure cloud traffic.
• A more detailed overview of the project is available in the Ambianic Docs.

Ambianic is licensed under a permissive Apache 2 Open Source License which allows you to fork, improve and infinitely hack the code. Contribute back to the original master branch if you wish, but you don't have to.

The team has a track record of leading impactful open source projects such as:

• Apache Cocoon
• Red Hat
  • JBoss
  • Mobicents
• Restcomm

We hope Ambianic's mission resonates with you and we look forward to your support in any form: docs, code, forum participation or funding!

Ivelin Ivanov
Founder, Ambianic.ai