Artefact — Front door · vision · voice · and a rebuild

Status: in progress. The device was built and is being rebuilt. The page states this rather than describing it as finished.

What the artefact is

A door unit with microphone, speaker, camera, button, PIR and mmWave presence. It detects a person, captures an image, logs it, has the image described, and announces to the house who is at the door before offering a spoken greeting; the visitor’s reply is captured and played over the house speakers, with an alert pushed to a phone. Voice output ran on one provider and now runs on a cloned voice with a fallback to a local synthesiser.

What it proves

Vision, voice and actuation in one device under real constraints — latency that a person at a door will tolerate, and a failure mode that must be polite.

Limits stated on the page

The measurement it is being rebuilt around: presence detection with a time-of-flight ranging sensor, to stop the unit greeting people who are walking past rather than standing at the door. Until the rebuild is finished the honest label is in-progress.

When it is delivered

Phase 7 for photos and the sensor change. Source: evidence notes section 1.