Ok, so I have the following setup at home:
Tablets with smarttiles & lannouncer in 5 key areas: Main foyer, second floor common area, kitchen, basement office & family room and every family member has a smartphone.
Anyone know of any good apps that will run in the background to work almost like an intercom system? So it can be installed in all the tablets and phones and as long as the device is within the geo fence it works?
Which operating system? iOS, android, windows phone?
IOS & Android
I am interested too. I have been watching nucleus very closely. After realizing control4 charged $999 per screen plus programming I have decided to look at other options.
It’s a lot of work and actually still a work in progress but currently I am using freepbx on a raspberry pI and then I just installed a sip client on my tsblets/phones. (Still looking for the best option ) I gave all the phones there own internal extention as well as an their own auto answer paging number then I can group them all in to a master page number as well. This way I can page the whole house, a single room, or actually call a room. With a little more work you can then link up google voice for making and receiveing extrenal calls.
Something I am going to try this week is Intercom for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.androidintercom&hl=en
Will update once I see how it goes.
I use that on my android tablets. It works very well
something tells me this isn’t the nucleus to which you refer, although the same name of a video intercom device would be pretty damn coincidental. Anyway, these are coming out in the next few months, four hundred for a two pack, video intercom for in house communication (with voice activation), phone to intercom, one house to another communication, and native smartthings integration (plus nest and a few others). What killed it for me, is they are also working with skybell. So when someone rings the doorbell, the video will pop up on these. Am I alone in my freaking out? Am I?
Nucleus is still in preorder, so who knows what it will have. They’re listed for pre-order on Amazon, which is a good sign, but I noticed that the Amazon listing does not say anything about Skybell.
It’s really nice looking, and it may turn out to be a great product, but so far it’s just marketing.
Also, even the marketing doesn’t say “native smartThings integration.” It just says “compatible with.” There’s no telling what features they actually mean by that. And neither of those means that it will combine with SmartTiles, which is what this thread is about.
I like the look of it, but I’m not going to make any evaluations of it until Amazon has started shipping. 
I think the nucleus is way too expensive for what it is.
how did this app work for you?
Would be cheaper to buy a bunch of Fire Tablets and install an intercom app. Probably be more functional too.
In my house we just text each other.
My ideal solution is if the echo can create 2 way communications between floors.
There are a lot of approaches. we use our watches to voice text, which is hands-free and fast. But we are three adult housemates. If you have kids, a video intercom is nice. 
I do like the looks of the nebula intercom, and since I have personal aides who come to the house, and they don’t all have smart phones, it would be nice when I woke up from a nap if I could use the intercom hands-free to alert them in the Family room. But for my purposes it has to be hands-free. And I don’t have the same privacy issues that many adults have.
So just another situation were different solutions will work for different people. Choice is good.
I’ll definitely take a look at the nebula once it’s actually shipping. But you never know how these things will go.
Switchmate was saying up until two weeks before it started shipping that it was going to have a yonomi integration. Which would have meant echo integration. But then one week before it started shipping they said the integration wasn’t ready, so I ended up never buying one.
Hardware is hard. 
Pretty well. I use an app called target home launcher which makes any app I set as the home screen so hitting home on the android device takes you there. I set it up as full screen browser which loads smarttiles. Then I have an overlay launcher with the intercom app shortcut. If I need to use it I simply hit the intercom then speak, when done I hit home and I am back on SmartTiles.
Nucleus now available at Lowes.
http://www.lowes.com/pd/Nucleus-Smart-Home-Intercom/999990374
Pricing looks decent - drops to $200 when you buy two or more tablets; They are also a native Alexa client so these devices are making more sense to me - if we can get SmartTiles working on them, then would be a definite contender in my new smart home build.
I was thinking about Echo Dots in a number of rooms plus wall mounted tablets in the main living spaces with some type of intercom app - this new device would cover all of the above in one polished PoE package.
@tgauchat - have the brains behind SmartTiles looked at a partnership approach - I’m sure the ST community would jump at solution.
Will pick one up anyhow to place with it. Cheers
Not yet. I’d rather wait to see how popular this product becomes first. So far no reviews, etc…
But I’ll keep an eye on it.
np, I’m going to pick one up to see how good the quality is - Ive also just dropped a note to their CEO asking them about capabilities to load /run standard web pages etc. if it has the chops to load custom urls, then it might be a great fit for you and the wider ST community.
Nucleus launched with very few features. A number of the features previously announced have been withdrawn for now. For example, you cannot group cast to more than one room at a time. Also, the Alexa web services feature requires tapping the tile on the nucleus screen, it is not hands-free. It also does not support all Alexa integrations. It launched without any direct smart home integrations, you can only do what you can do through the Alexa services and I don’t think it has a web browser at all, although I might be wrong on that one. It’s a video intercom, but not a hands-free video intercom.
BTW, looked at for just what it is, I do like nucleus. It’s a little expensive for the features that it launched with but it doesn’t really have a lot of competition. Basically it’s a really nice UI for a button press video intercom. so you press a button on one device, you get immediate video chat to the device you selected. And you can use it with a phone app also so you could call your intercom at home.
If I could use my hands, and I had kids, and I was willing to spend $400 on a pair of these, I’d like it a lot.
Or if I had an aging parent and I wanted really easy video chat communication.
As it is, it doesn’t meet my needs (hands-free is a minimum requirement), but I think it will definitely fit some use cases.
yep, good assessment - we’ll see if they’re a player in the game - locking down to their own services and trying to go it alone sadly wont get it done for a device of this type. I would bet that 95% of the time, the tablet is idle (ie not being used for video calling) so they must find a way to leverage it in other ways. ideally SmartTiles, with Google ChromeCast Dayframe for family photos 
Re Alexa capabilities - Amazon have clearly stated that oem partners wanting to integrate Alexa into their hardware can only do so via a button press - they’re reserving continuous listening for their own echo line for now - Im ok with that.
I still think I’m going to get one to test it out.