Design

Mui's wooden 'Calm' hub is an Alexa stand-in that doesn't ruin your decor

This smart home hub is meant to make interacting with voice-assistants a more peaceful process.

Voice-assistants are great — or at least they are in theory. Sometimes, they’re not so great at listening, or worse, sometimes they listen too much. Then there’s one of my biggest pet peeves: the not-so-inconspicuous hardware.

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Mui wants to fix all that (or at least make the faults less irksome)

With a hub prototype called “Calm,” Mui wants to make your smart home experience more serene by streamlining features through an interactive, minimalist, piece of mountable wood that doesn’t harsh the vibe, aesthetically or otherwise.