Talk to Eve Room with Siri, but don't expect it to talk back

[MUSIC] I'm Andrew Gebhart for CNet. Today, I'm taking a look at the Elgato Eve Room. This is an indoor air sensor that's compatible with Apple's home kit. This guy is Bluetooth-enabled and battery-powered and sends you readings on temperature Humidity and air quality, if you just painted your home or have done some construction. Alternatively if you're suffering from some allergies, this thing should be able to diagnose the problem. And let you know hey, maybe you need to air this room out a little bit more before you spend some time in it. That's pretty cool, and $80 actually isn't bad for something that Cycling measure volatile organic compounds and this thing was pretty accurate on all three of it's criteria and gave us accurate readings that were then graphed and you can view those graphs by the day, the hour, the week, the month. It's kinda cool. There were a few times I was using it when it refused to update on me. And there's no way in the app to force a refresh. So it can be kind of a pain to be looking at the app, and it looks like it's up to date, but actually you're looking at readings that are a couple of hours behind. Again, that only happened to me twice, but it did annoy me both times, and it's something to watch out for. And thanks to home kit, you can ask Siri a question like this. Hey Siri, what's the temperature in the living room? It's at 76.1. So the egato Eve room makes it easy to check on the conditions of a room and graph that data over time. What it doesn't do is give you any way to use that information. information. You can't set up warning thresholds, triggers, push notifications. So if those volatile organic compounds rise to a dangerous level, you have to be in the range of the device with the app open to even Even know about it. It is unable to talk to anything or use the info it gets in any sort of helpful way that actually makes it a part of a larger smart home system. In theory this device will improve and gain that function. [MUSIC] Functionality as Apple's home kit improves. But we'll have to wait and see on that. To me, the whole idea of a smart phone is to automate tasks for you. And as of yet, this thing can't do that. So right now, again, unless you have a specific use in mind for it. I recommend you pass on the El Gato [UNKNOWN]. Room. For more, be sure to check out my full review on CNET.com. For CNET appliances, I'm Andrew Decker. [BLANK_AUDIO]