Ilarna Nche is only 23 years old but already created 30 skills and runs her own voice business, Adassa Innovations.

Charlie Cadbury, CEO of Say It Now, has adapted alongside technology since 1999 when he sold his first website. Today, Say It Now is a group of enterprise natural language processing (NLP) experts building out conversational strategies and products alongside Fortune 500 companies.

Vocala, a digital agency based in Surrey, England and led by Richard Matthews, decided in 2018 to create a voice studio that specialises in creating games and interactive skills for Alexa-enabled devices.

Hugo Catchpole didn’t plan to go into voice, but when he got an Amazon Echo Dot for a birthday present in 2017 he couldn’t help but start to tinker with a skill.

Landon Borders, Director of Connected Devices at Big Ass Solutions, still chuckles when he tells customers how the company got its name. Founder Carey Smith started his company back in 1999, naming it HVLS Fan Company. Its mission was to produce a line of high-volume, low-speed (HVLS) industrial fans. HVLS Fan Company sold fans up to 24-feet in diameter for warehouses and fabrication mills.

“People would always say to him ‘Wow, that’s a big-ass fan.’ They wanted more information, but they never knew how to reach us,” says Borders. So the founder listed the company in the phone book twice, both as HVLS Fan Company and Big Ass Fans. Guess which phone rang more often? “In essence, our customers named the company.”

Today the parent company is Big Ass Solutions. It still owns Big Ass Fans. It also builds Big Ass Lights and Haiku Home, a line of smart residential lighting and fans. Now with an Alexa skill, the company’s customers can control their devices using only their voice.

Creating the world’s first smart fan

Haiku Home is where Alexa comes into the picture.

Big Ass Fans (BAF) is a direct-sales company. As such, it gets constant and direct feedback about customers' satisfaction and product applications. BAF found people were using its industrial-grade products in interesting commercial and home applications. It saw an exciting new opportunity. So in 2012, BAF purchased a unique motor technology, allowing it to create a sleek, low-profile residential fan.

That was just the starting point for BAF’s line of home products. The next year, BAF introduced Haiku with SenseME, the world’s first smart fan.

What’s a smart fan? Borders says it first has to have cutting-edge technology. Haiku Home fans include embedded motion, temperature and humidity sensors. A microprocessor uses that data to adjust the fan and light kits to the user's tastes. The device also has to be connected, so it includes a Wi-Fi radio.

The smart fan joins Alexa’s Smart Home

The microprocessor and Wi-Fi radio make the SenseME fan a true IoT device. Customers use a smartphone app to configure the fan’s set-it-and-go preferences. But after that, why should you need an app?

Borders remembers discussions in early 2015 centered on people getting tired of smartphone apps. Using apps were a good starting point, but the company found some users didn’t want to control their fan with their smartphone. BAF felt voice was definitely the user interface of the future. When they saw Amazon heavily investing in the technology, they knew what the next step would be.

They would let customers control their fans and lights simply by talking to Alexa.