Honeywell took its biggest step yet towards building a smart, connected home last year with the Lyric Thermostat — an obvious competitor to the Nest Learning Thermostat. Now, the company is moving beyond a single product and building out its vision of a Honeywell-powered connected home with the next piece of the Lyric family: a home security system. It's a logical place for Honeywell to go next — Google and Nest's $555 million purchase of Dropcam is a pretty good sign that home security will likely be a frontier the companies try to tackle next.
While the Lyric thermostat was a single piece of hardware, Honeywell's home security system looks to be a more complicated affair — the main pieces of the system consist of "awareness" cameras plus motion, smoke, and intruder alarms. Presumably, users will be able to buy as many pieces of this system as they need to blanket their houses.
The whole system is controlled by a wall-mounted touchscreen panel that doesn't look all that dissimilar from some of Honeywell's non-Lyric touchscreen thermostats. Unfortunately, Honeywell hasn't shared much of a look at the UI, so it's hard to say exactly how all these pieces will tie together yet — but the company says that the touchscreen won't be the only way to control your system. It'll also be voice-activated, so owners could disable the security system by using a pre-recorded phrase (like "Lyric, I'm home"). We're also guessing that Lyric will be connected to your smartphone, but Honeywell didn't release any specifics on that front yet.
Honeywell wants Lyric to play nice with third-party home automation products
Honeywell also notes that its home security setup will be compatible with the existing Lyric thermostat, so your voice-activate command could also adjust the temperature as well as deactivating the security system. And the company says that Lyric will be able to work with other, third-party home automation products, so it could conceivably work with a host of other products. At this point, however, details on exactly how Lyric will play with third-party systems are unknown.
There's also no word on exactly how much this system will cost, or when consumers will be able to purchase it. Most importantly, we're not sure exactly how the different parts will all play together — but Honeywell will be showing the whole system off on the CES show floor starting today. We'll be going to check it out and see if the home really is getting any smarter this year.