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Talk to your smart home with Facebook Messenger at CES 2018

Netatmo wants you to control your smart devices via its new Facebook-friendly chatbot.

Megan Wollerton Former Senior Writer/Editor
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If you ever wanted to chat with your smart home, now you can.

Netatmo

Forget voice control. Netatmo wants you to interact with your smart home through Facebook Messenger and Netatmo's own Smart Home Bot. Netatmo's Smart Home Bot is a free chatbot available exclusively through Facebook's Messenger service, ready to respond to your queries whether you're home or away. 

Many of the company's home security and climate and weather monitoring devices already integrate with Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant. Now, Netatmo says, it's expanding to Facebook's messaging service -- to allow for "greater mobility and privacy." 

In places where you either can't -- or wouldn't want to use voice commands -- instead type out questions to the Smart Home Bot. Ask it about the current weather, who's at home or even instruct it to turn on lights.

The chatbot is available for use now in English; additional languages are expected to follow later in 2018. Just open up a chat in Messenger and start talking. The bot's "Natural Language Processing" should understand. It's also supposed to work with all Netatmo products, as well as third-party products compatible with Netatmo. 

The Smart Home at CES 2018: We take a look at the smart home and appliance trends that might show up at CES 2018.

CES 2018: CNET's complete coverage of tech's biggest show.

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