Dog got out? Left your phone somewhere? Those can be automation triggers.
SwitchBot had a few AI-powered devices on display at IFA 2025; not just a furry little robot pet (I picked it up and it’s not cuddly). They included an E Ink AI art display, which generates AI art on demand, an AI tennis robot that you can “play” matches against, and a couple of robot vacuums. We’ll get to all of that, but the main thing that caught my eye was the SwitchBot AI Hub.
It’s not that the others aren’t interesting—of course they are—it’s that I love good, easy automation. The promise of the AI Hub is two-fold: it can access SwitchBot’s Vision Language Model (VLM)—such models can interpret visuals and text at the same time—enabling natural language prompts that you can use both for setting up automations and searching connected security camera footage for events they recorded to its internal storage. It only supports SwitchBot’s cameras for now, although the company says that could change later.
Some examples include asking the AI Hub, via the SwitchBot app, when you left your phone somewhere in your house or when your dog got out. You can also set it to trigger automations based on events it identifies, like alerting you that your dog escaped. As for that local storage, the AI Hub comes with 32GB, but that’s expandable up to 1TB using a microSD card slot on one side or one of the USB-C ports on the back.
Unfortunately, automations using the AI Hub will cost money as you’ll need a subscription to a cloud plan that the company will debut in October, according to a SwitchBot rep.
