The Nucleus intercom is new. It’s basically a pretty UI on a dedicated tablet that also allows you to call in from a phone. You can’t use the tablet for anything else. It also has the hands free Alexa service, which gives you some of the features of an Amazon echo, although not all (for example, no Spotify) and it doesn’t have the echo’s hardware advantage in farfield recognition. But it’s a tablet you can hang on the wall and use to video call another tablet either in your house or someone else’s house, as well as calling from a phone.
Pros: should be really easy for kids to use, just press a picture tile to open a connection to another nucleus tablet.
Because of the Alexa service, you can also use it for hands-free voice control of SmartThings
Has both audio and video
Should be excellent for wellness checks on a senior relative in another residence because it’s very easy to use. They have a lot of examples on the manufacturer site of grandchildren talking to their grandparents.
Cons: there’s no browser on the tablet and you can’t run anything else on it, like smarttiles
It’s quite expensive, around $250 a unit although the price goes down if you buy several at once.
You can only connect to one device at a time, although they said they’re working on eventual group casting.
And the only feature which is hands-free is using Alexa. You have to touch the tablet to make an intercom call.
https://www.amazon.com/Nucleus-Anywhere-Intercom-built-Service/dp/B019JSE7PC
There are a couple of community members who have it, including @Andy_Armijo . So they can say more from actual experience.
So all in all it looks like a nice, if expensive, video intercom that also allows access to SmartThings via the Alexa service.
For me, the two biggest negatives are that you cannot also run SmartTiles on it and that it is not hands-free for the intercom. But I can see it being useful in a lot of homes.