Introducing Family Accounts and Home/Away Assist

Before a home can take care of you and your family, it needs to know one thing: Are you there, or not? Today, Nest homes are better at answering that question because of two new features. We call them Family Accounts and Home/Away Assist.

When your Nest products know if you’re home or away, they can do the right thing, automatically. Like turn the heat up or down. Turn the lights on or off.

Share your Nest.

Your home isn’t just your home. You share it with others – your spouse, roommates, parents. So today, we’re introducing Family Accounts.

Family Accounts let up to 10 people access the Nest products in your home using the Nest app with their own Nest Accounts. No more sharing logins or passwords. It’s easy to add and remove people from your Family Account. So now the whole family can control the Nest Thermostat, get notifications from Nest Protect, see what’s happening at home with Nest Cam, and get their own copy of the monthly Home Report.

Is anyone home?

To guess if you’re home, other products use a single phone’s location to define a virtual barrier, or geofencing. Then they track your phone to determine when you cross that barrier. But that can lead to mistakes. Geofencing isn’t very precise, so a product might think you’re home when you’re really a couple blocks away. Plus, we forget our phones. They break or get stolen. Their batteries die. And what if a roommate, guest or babysitter is still at home? Geofencing alone can get it wrong – turn the lights off when someone’s home. Or run the heat when no one is.

So Nest takes a more thoughtful approach, using more information to get it right. Home/Away Assist uses learning algorithms and activity sensors built into Nest products – the same things the Nest Learning Thermostat has been using for four years to help save energy. And Home/Away Assist also uses your phone’s location to do an even better job of telling if anyone’s home.

Family Accounts provides a critical piece of the puzzle. When family members opt in, it lets Home/Away Assist use data from their phones – Android or iOS. So Home/Away Assist will switch to Away only if everyone is out. And it won’t turn down the heat if someone is in a room not visible to any activity sensors.

We’ve wanted to do Home/Away Assist for a long time now. But more importantly, we wanted to do it right. By combining sensor data, algorithms and multiple phones, we think we’ve nailed it.

Nest has always taken your privacy seriously. And we always will. That’s why Nest doesn’t track where you go. Home/Away Assist only needs to know if you’re home or not. And we keep your information safe and secure by encrypting our connections and staying up to date on the latest threats.

With Home/Away Assist, Nest Cam can turn on when you leave and off when you walk in the door, so it’s an even better security camera. Your Nest Thermostat can turn the heat on right when you get home. Your Nest Protect can run its monthly Sound Check while you’re out. And Works with Nest products can use Home/Away Assist to work better too.

It’s all about making home more comfortable, safe and secure for you. And everyone else who lives there too.

To start using Home/Away Assist and Family Accounts, simply download the latest update of the Nest app.