By 2015 it was clear the "internet of things" was going to arrive as a pile of disconnected apps — one for the lights, one for the thermostat, one for the lock — each demanding its own login and its own home-screen icon. Thington's bet was that the right interface for a house full of things wasn't an app at all. It was a conversation.
Underneath the plain-language commands sat a service layer that could talk to dozens of different device platforms and normalise them into something a person could address without knowing or caring which company had made the hardware.