Tag: new features

Aragon MCP: Control Your Smart Home From the AI Assistant You Choose

AI assistants have become part of daily life for a great many people — answering questions, drafting documents, planning a trip, or just helping think something through. Increasingly, those assistants don’t just talk anymore. They act: booking a reservation, editing a file, checking a calendar. A new open standard called the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is what makes that possible — it lets an AI assistant discover a set of “tools” a service exposes, understand in plain language what each one does, and call them on your behalf.

Until now, your Aragon Maestro wasn’t one of the services an AI assistant could reach. Aragon MCP changes that.

What it is

Aragon MCP exposes Aragon Maestro’s home-automation controls — lights, shutters, thermostat, scenes — as a small set of clearly defined tools an AI assistant can use. This isn’t a future promise: it’s working today, and you can connect an AI assistant to your Maestro right now, with more AI platforms joining as they adopt the standard. That includes today’s popular cloud-based AI assistants, and local, self-hosted AI assistants running on your own hardware — MCP is an open standard, so it doesn’t matter where the AI itself lives, only that it speaks MCP.

Once connected, you can simply say what you want:

  • “Turn off the living room lights.”
  • “What’s the temperature set to in the office?”
  • “Close the shutters everywhere.”

Your AI assistant figures out which tool to call and what to say, and Aragon Maestro carries it out immediately — through the exact same natural-language pipeline that already powers your voice control today. (Scheduling a command for later is a separate Maestro feature; Aragon MCP itself always acts right away, the moment you ask.)

Speak however you actually speak

You don’t need to learn a command syntax, and you don’t need to speak English. Your AI assistant translates whatever language you’re comfortable in into the phrasing your Maestro understands, on the fly. Say “Tänd i vardagsrummet” in Swedish, and what reaches your Maestro is simply “turn on the living room” — no setup, no language setting to change, just ask in your own words.

The same flexibility covers small mistakes. Say “turn off living,” or misspell it as “livingrooom” — your AI assistant already knows the actual rooms your Maestro has, so it recognises what you mean and sends your Maestro the exact right name before the command goes out. You don’t have to get the wording exactly right; your AI assistant closes that gap for you.

How it works

Connecting is standard, secure, and doesn’t ask you to manage any secrets by hand. Your Maestro exposes an MCP server at a single URL; your AI assistant discovers it and authenticates using OAuth 2.1 with PKCE — the authorisation approach the MCP standard itself recommends. There’s no API key or client secret to generate ahead of time: your AI assistant registers itself automatically the first time you connect (via OAuth Dynamic Client Registration), then takes you through a normal browser sign-in — except here, you’re signing in with your own Maestro owner password, not handing credentials to any third party.

Reaching your Maestro from outside your home network doesn’t require opening a port on your router. A private, end-to-end encrypted tunnel connects your AI assistant to your Maestro and nothing else on your network.

Optional — and the core of Maestro still needs neither the internet nor a subscription

This is worth being precise about: Aragon MCP is an opt-in feature you turn on if and when you want it. It’s not a requirement, and it changes nothing about how your Maestro behaves if you leave it off.

That matters because of what Aragon MCP is layered on top of. Voice control on Maestro runs 100% on-device — speech recognition, language understanding, and text-to-speech all happen locally, with no internet connection and no subscription required for any of it. If you choose to connect a cloud-based AI assistant through Aragon MCP, that specific request naturally passes through that assistant’s own cloud service to be understood — that’s simply how a cloud AI assistant works, on any platform, and it’s true the moment you decide to use one. Choose a local, self-hosted AI assistant instead, and even that step can stay on your own network. Either way, what doesn’t change is what happens next: the instant your request reaches your Maestro, it runs through the same local, on-device pipeline that has always executed every home command. No separate cloud “smart home” account. No home hub or subscription service sitting in the middle. No company beyond the one you already chose to talk to.

Why it matters

Smart home platforms have a habit of picking a favourite assistant for you and locking the door behind it. Aragon MCP does the opposite: it meets you wherever you already are, in whatever language and phrasing feels natural, using whatever AI you already trust — without asking you to adopt a new app, pay a new subscription, or hand your home to a new company. As the AI landscape keeps shifting, your home doesn’t have to keep up with it — it just has to stay open, and that’s what MCP gives it.

Are you ready for a home that knows what you want before you do?

Imagine walking into a room in your smart home. The temperature is perfect, the lights turn on before you get there, and your favourite music is playing in the background. You feel instantly comfortable. It seems like magic! How does your smart home system know what you want without any prompts from you?  Read on to find out.

Intelligent presence prediction is the umbrella term for the seemingly magic anticipatory abilities of modern smart home products. The devices are able to ‘know’ what the user wants before they even know it themselves with two different, but complementary methods.

Nowcasting: The “Here and Now”

Nowcasting is about understanding what’s happening right now. Your motion sensors detect you’re in the room. Your door sensor shows you just arrived home. This is real-time intelligence—instant and reactive. It’s perfect for immediate actions like turning on lights when you enter a space or adjusting temperature the moment you wake up.

Think of it as your home paying attention in the present moment.

Forecasting: The Smart Prediction

Forecasting goes further. It learns your patterns and predicts what you’ll want before you need it. Based on your daily habits, calendar, location history, and preferences, your home anticipates your next move. Your thermostat warms up 15 minutes before you typically arrive home. Your bedroom lights dim automatically on Friday evenings because your home knows your weekend routine.

It’s not reacting—it’s thinking ahead.

Why Does This Matter?

While nowcasting keeps your home responsive and safe, forecasting transforms it from a reactive system into a truly anticipatory one. This means:

✦ Better comfort: No more entering a cold home or dark rooms
✦ True energy efficiency: Systems optimize before you arrive, not after
✦ Seamless experience: Your home feels like it understands your lifestyle
✦ Reduced friction: Fewer manual adjustments needed

The Future of Home Automation

The most advanced smart homes combine both approaches. They react instantly to what’s happening now while simultaneously predicting what comes next. It’s the difference between a home that responds to you and a home that anticipates you.

The line between convenience and intelligence is getting thinner. Are you ready for a home that doesn’t just react—but predicts?

Home Automation rules! Especially with  the new Aragon Maestro feature

Home Automation really does rule, now that the Home Automation Rules feature has been incorporated into the Aragon Maestro toolkit. This feature lets users create recurring automations using natural language input. Aragon Maestro can be controlled in real-time with on-the-spot voice commands. Now, with the new Home Automation Rules feature, actions can also be scheduled to work automatically during a period of the user’s choosing, or in relation to day/night natural light changes.

How It Works

The Home Automation Rules feature provides a web-based interface where users type commands in plain language to create automation rules. The system accepts input in English, French, or German. An on-device Large Language Model (LLM) processes these text commands and converts them into structured schedules that the Maestro then carries out automatically.

Examples of supported rules include:

  • “Turn on the kitchen lights 15 minutes before sunset every day.”
  • “Activate cozy scene at sunset on weekends.”
  • “Set the bedroom temperature to 22 degrees on weekday mornings.”
  • “Close all shutters at 10 PM on weekends.”

The web interface displays all active rules and allows users to add, edit, enable, disable, or delete them as needed.

Complete Privacy and Offline Operation

The Home Automation Rules feature operates entirely on-device with no cloud dependency. What’s said at home, stays at home!

On-device processing: Natural language parsing, rule scheduling, and command execution all happen locally on the Aragon Maestro. The system requires no internet connection for its core functions.

No data transmission: Automation rules are stored in a local database on the device. Nothing is transmitted to external servers or analyzed by third parties.

Reliable operation: Because the feature does not depend on internet connectivity, scheduled automations execute reliably regardless of network status.

What Can Be Automated

Any action that can be controlled through voice commands can also be scheduled as an automation rule. This includes:

  • Scenes: Activate predefined scenes such as “Movie Night” or “Good Morning” at specified times.
  • Lighting: Control lights to turn on at sunrise, dim to a specific percentage, or turn off at bedtime.
  • Shutters and blinds: Schedule blinds to open in the morning or close at sunset.
  • Heating: Set temperature targets for specific rooms at designated times.

Technical Implementation

The Home Automation Rules feature consists of three main components working together:

Natural Language Processing Engine: An on-board LLM interprets user input and extracts the command to execute along with scheduling details (time, days, solar events, and offsets). The system uses language-specific prompts to accurately parse commands in English, French, or German.

Scheduling System: A scheduling engine converts parsed rules into scheduled jobs. The system handles both fixed-time rules and solar-based triggers. For solar events like sunrise and sunset, the engine calculates precise times based on the user’s geographic location and updates these calculations daily to account for seasonal changes.

Execution Layer: When a scheduled time arrives, the system publishes the command to the same MQTT endpoint used by Aragon’s voice control system. This ensures that any command that works via voice will also function as a scheduled rule.

Multi-Language Support

The system provides native support for three languages. Users can write rules in their preferred language, and the LLM correctly interprets scheduling expressions such as:

  • English: “every weekday”, “at sunset”, “on weekends”
  • French: “les jours de semaine”, “au coucher du soleil”, “le week-end”
  • German: “an Wochentagen”, “bei Sonnenuntergang”, “am Wochenende”

The backend normalizes these expressions into a standardized format for consistent scheduling across languages.

User Interface

The web-based interface provides a straightforward workflow:

  1. Users enter a rule in natural language
  2. The system parses and validates the rule, showing the interpreted command and schedule
  3. Users confirm and create the rule
  4. All active rules are displayed in a list with options to edit, enable/disable, or delete

The interface also allows users to set their location (city or coordinates) to ensure accurate calculation of solar events.

Availability

The Home Automation Rules feature is available as a software update for all Aragon Maestro users. The update can be installed through the Maestro’s web interface. For more information about Aragon Maestro and its capabilities, visit heyaragon.com.

Spotify on Aragon – A Technical Overview

Spotify Voice Control use on Sonos via Aragon Maestro

Introducing Aragon Maestro’s new feature for controlling Spotify playback on Sonos speakers! This new solution is engineered with a privacy-first, offline-focused approach that leverages on-device processing for all sensitive actions. How does Aragon process the request? Read on to find out.

System Architecture and Data Flow

The control sequence from voice command to music playback is executed primarily on the local network, minimizing external communication.

  1. Voice Data Acquisition: A local network Aragon Satellite (WL or PoE) captures the user’s voice command requesting certain music. The raw audio data is streamed directly to the Aragon Maestro over the local network.
  2. On-Device Speech-to-Text (STT): Aragon Maestro processes the incoming audio stream using the on-board Whisper ASR model for speech-to-text conversion. This entire transcription process occurs locally on -device with no voice data sent to the cloud.
  3. On-Device Natural Language Processing (NLP): The resulting text string is fed into a local, on-device Large Language Model (LLM). This AI-driven model interprets the command, identifying the user’s intent, e.g., play, pause, skip, and the relevant information needed to carry out the command , e.g., artist name, song title, playlist. This allows the system to understand complex, natural language queries without relying on predefined vocabulary or cloud-based NLP services.
  4. Spotify API Interaction: Once the request is understood, the Aragon Maestro makes a targeted, anonymous query to the Spotify API. This is the only point of contact with an external cloud service. The purpose is strictly to enumerate tracks, albums, or artists based on the user’s request, and to retrieve the necessary identifiers for playback. No user-specific or personally identifiable information is transmitted by the Aragon system in this query.
  5. Local Sonos Control: Using track information from Spotify, the Maestro issues a command directly to the Sonos speaker(s) over the local area network (LAN). This instructs the Sonos system to stream the selected media directly from Spotify’s servers.

Key technical differences between Aragon and generic smart speakers

  • Private-by-Design: The entire voice processing pipeline (STT and NLP) is self-contained within the Aragon Maestro, ensuring user voice commands are never exposed to the internet.
  • Local Network Operation: All communication between Aragon Satellites, the Aragon Maestro, and the Sonos speakers occurs on the local network.
  • Minimal Cloud Footprint: The only external communication required is a stateless, anonymous request to the Spotify API for discovering music. There is no constant connection or data exchange with Aragon-hosted cloud services.
  • Integrated AI: The use of on-device Whisper and LLM technologies provide advanced, flexible voice control without need for an internet connection to process commands

Sound Event Detection – a new Aragon Maestro feature!

Aragon Maestro’s latest update introduces Sound Event Detection (SED). This is a sophisticated feature that enables real-time monitoring and classification of various acoustic events in the home environment. YAMNet neural network technology catagorises sounds into Alert, Human, Household, and Animal categories.

Sound Event Detection Overview

The Sound Event Detection (SED) feature in Aragon Maestro 2.1.0 processes audio streams from Aragon Satellites using UDP protocol, analyzing them for both wake words and sound events. This system employs YAMNet for sound classification, which therefore enables real-time detection and categorization of various acoustic events in the home environment. While the Maestro can handle multiple satellites simultaneously, it is recommended to configure only one satellite for SED during the initial deployment phase. To utilize SED, the satellite’s wake word system must be set to ‘Centralized’. This therefore allows the Maestro to manage wake word detection and enabling audio streaming for sound event analysis.

Configuring Sound Event Detection in Maestro

To set up SED in Aragon Maestro, follow these steps:

  • Update the system to Aragon Maestro version 2.1.0 and Wakeword (Central) to version 1.1.1 from the Maestro About page
  • Select the desired satellite and set its Wakeword system to ‘Centralized’
  • Save the configuration
  • Enable SED through the “Step 5. Configure ‘Sound Events’” dialog
  • Access the SED user interface at MAESTRO-IP:1880/dashboard/all

For optimal performance in this early release, we recommend that only one satellite should be configured for Sound Event Detection. The ‘Centralized’ Wakeword setting is crucial as it allows the Maestro to handle wake word detection and enables audio streaming for SED functionality.

Monitoring Interface Features

The SED monitoring interface is accessible at MAESTRO-IP:1880/dashboard/all. It offers a comprehensive view of detected sound events through five tabs: All Sounds, Alert, Human, Household, and Animal.

Each tab features:

  • A time chart with color-coded dots representing detected sounds by category
  • A Sound Event Gauge displaying instant detection values
  • A Sound Activity time chart for temporal visualization
  • A Sound Event list showing the latest events in text format

The ‘All Sounds’ tab provides an overview of all categories, while the other tabs offer detailed information specific to each sound type. This intuitive interface allows users to easily monitor and analyze various acoustic events in their environment, enhancing the overall functionality of the Aragon Maestro system.

Sound Categories and Notifications

The SED system categorizes sounds into four main groups: Alert, Human, Household, and Animal, each with specific detection thresholds and aliases. For instance, Alert sounds include alarms and glass breaking, while Human sounds encompass speech and physical noises. Users can configure custom notifications through Node-RED, integrating with pushover.net for remote alerts. In addition, for off-site monitoring, Tailscale VPN enables secure connections to the Maestro, allowing users to access the SED dashboard and examine detailed sound event charts from anywhere. This comprehensive approach ensures users stay informed about significant acoustic events in their environment, even when away from home.

Aragon 1.5 – What’s new?

Aragon Version 1.5 – get ready to be amazed!

We have been working tirelessly over the last months to add to the capabilities of our Aragon Master! In this article we discuss the new features that have just been released.

The Aragon Master will soon have enhanced abilities, from ability to be interoperable with the majority of smart-home systems, to having the latest documentation at your fingertips, to optimizing voice commands to fine-tune individual devices to perfectly suit the end-user.

1. Homebridge Integration

One of the most important new features of our Aragon Master allows interoperability with any smart-home standard, from the already established KNX standard, to Matter, or the Apple Homekit.

Homebridge has been developed by a large number of plugin developers and core contributors. It allows integration of smart home devices unsupported by Apple’s Homekit into any smart home solution. Consequently, users can install Homebridge on the Aragon Master to access a slew of plugins developed for easy integration of thousands of smart appliances.

Choice in the smart-home world has suddenly become a lot larger!

For more information on Homebridge, click the link below:

https://homebridge.io/

2. Aragon documentation now integrated into the Aragon Master

Aragon Documentation and Help is now integrated on Aragon Master. This means that all the information you need is at your fingertips. On-device, you can find a mirror of up-to-date help documentation, history, and NodeRed that is also found on Github.

Watch the video below to see a demonstration of the user experience offered by the new on-device help and documentation service.

3. Voice Control Optimization

The third feature that we are very pleased to be able to bring you is Voice Command Optimization. Users can now fine-tune voice commands by excluding commands that are not useful, e.g. if the building has no shutters or blinds, the commands to control them can be removed.

The user can also select from various models of assistants with different sets of commands from “large”, to “medium”, to “tiny”. An advantage for using a “tiny” range of commands could be for a user with unclear pronunciation. As there are fewer possibilities available, the smart speaker will be less likely to pick the “wrong” command.

4. Updated Voice Assistants

We have also done a significant amount of development in the area of Text to Speech voices that are available to the user of the Aragon smart speaker. The quality of each voice option has become greatly enhanced, which promotes better understanding for the end-user.

Additionally, the range of English-speaking voices has been markedly increased, particularly in the variety of British accents on offer. A wider choice of voices in German and French has also been added.

Shop for the Aragon Master and satellites here.