Honeywell voice-activated thermostat has its say

Honeywell has been playing catch-up in the smart thermostat game of late. Their $249 Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat is extremely capable, but came on the heels of the $249 Nest Learning Thermostat; a slightly panicked response to a surprise competitor.

But today’s announcement from Honeywell serves as a reminder that an industry rival can be a good thing -- it tends to speed up innovation and it makes us consumers feel like we’re being courted. Not too shabby.

I’m talking about the newly announced $349 Honeywell Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat with Voice Control.

And if you think it looks a lot like the $249 Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat I recently reviewed, you would be right. It is essentially the same: you will still be able to control your heating and cooling remotely using Honeywell's Total Connect Comfort app for Android and iOS, you can still change the background color to suit your mood or wall color, and it will still learn your habits over time. But the $349 model comes with a pretty major update: cloud-based voice-recognition tech.

To activate voice control on this thermostat, you simply say, "Hello, thermostat." You can be anywhere in your house -- provided it's no more than 25 feet away -- and the far-field voice-control tech takes care of the rest. It claims to cancel out any background noise so it's ready to listen intently for your commands. Honeywell also says that this model will add more commands to enhance your level of interactivity over time -- I'm pretty excited to test that functionality.

Unfortunately, you can't request the current indoor or outdoor temperature or ask it to go to a specific temperature, say 72 degrees. But, you can say "Make it warmer or cooler," and it will automatically go up or down one degree. If you say, "Make it much warmer or much cooler," it knows to move up or down four degrees. You can also say, "Make it four degrees warmer or four degrees cooler," and supposedly it will do that, too.

For those of you who already have the Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat, you won't be able to upgrade your current model to include voice control tech. However, if you have $349 to drop on a thermostat and like the idea of voice control, this could be an option for you.

This type of smart tech is new to the residential thermostat world and might have some companies scrambling to compete. I am especially curious to see if Nest is working on something similar. They did just partner with Intellectual Ventures, so who knows what might come next?

Honeywell's $349 Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat with Voice Control will be available for purchase in November at Lowes, Home Depot, Best Buy, and Amazon. We'll have a review for you soon, but in the meantime, check out my video on how to install the Honeywell Wi-Fi Smart Thermostat.