Hey Boo FAQ

Hey Boo is BOOJEE's voice-first AI assistant — the primary interface to the Boojee ecosystem and to your entire digital life. Say "Hey Boo" and it routes your command to the right service: controls your smart home via Home Assistant, navigates to any of 29+ Boojee services, or captures unknown commands for follow-up.

The north-star vision: an AI operating system for a human life. Not just a smart speaker skill — an intent router and orchestration layer that gets things done.

No. Hey Boo is an intent router and orchestration layer, not a chatbot. It does not generate conversational responses or have open-ended discussions. It takes your command, classifies what you want, dispatches to the right action, and confirms.

Multi-turn session memory allows context to flow between commands (so "book it" can refer to something mentioned two turns ago), but Hey Boo is fundamentally action-oriented. Think CEO dispatching to specialists — not a conversation partner.

Smart speakers are single-purpose devices tied to their manufacturer's cloud ecosystem. Hey Boo is an AI operating system layer that works across devices (browser, phone, speaker) and ecosystems.

Key differences: Hey Boo controls your smart home via Home Assistant (local, not cloud), integrates with 29+ Boojee business services, is designed for extensibility (any new service can be added as an adapter), and is being built toward specialist agent orchestration for complex multi-step work — not just answering weather questions and playing music.

Yes — and in several important ways, Hey Boo is better. Hey Boo controls your smart home via Home Assistant, which processes device commands locally without Google's cloud. No Google account required. Your home data doesn't leave your local network.

Google has also retired Google Assistant in favor of Gemini — introducing deprecation risk for anyone relying on it. Hey Boo uses an open adapter architecture that doesn't depend on any single cloud provider's strategy. The trade-off: Hey Boo requires a Home Assistant hub for smart-home control, while Google Home works with many devices out of the box without a hub.

Yes, for most home automation use cases. Every Alexa voice command goes to Amazon's cloud for processing. Hey Boo + Home Assistant can process smart-home commands locally — zero Amazon dependency for device control.

Hey Boo also integrates with 29+ Boojee business services that Alexa doesn't support: AI receptionist, website builder, booking, cleaning dispatch, signals, and more. The trade-off is the same as with Google: Alexa works with more devices out-of-the-box without requiring a Home Assistant hub.

Google has shifted from Google Assistant (designed for home control) to Gemini (a general-purpose AI chatbot). For users who built their smart-home setup around Google Assistant, this means their existing workflows may break as Google migrates the experience.

This is a concrete example of the deprecation risk we discuss in the white paper: when you depend on a cloud assistant, you depend on that company's product strategy. Hey Boo's open architecture means BOOJEE's strategy decisions don't break your home setup.

Hey Boo is designed with privacy as a first principle. Smart-home commands route to your local Home Assistant hub — device states and home context stay on your local network. Intent routing uses AWS Bedrock Nova on your own AWS account. Long-term memory is stored in your own DynamoDB table, not a shared database.

Important caveat: the browser's Web Speech API (used in Chrome/Edge) sends audio to Google's cloud STT for transcription. This is a browser limitation, not Hey Boo's design. Fully local audio processing (on-device Whisper) is on the roadmap. Short version: what you say is transcribed by your browser's STT provider; the text transcript is what Hey Boo processes.

No. Hey Boo never receives audio — only the text transcript. Audio capture and speech-to-text happen inside your browser (Web Speech API). The text transcript is what gets sent to the Hey Boo backend. No voice recording is stored anywhere in the Hey Boo system.

No — not your device states, device history, or home context. When you say "turn off the lights," Hey Boo classifies the intent and sends the API call directly to your local Home Assistant hub. The only data that leaves your home is the text of the command you spoke.

Your Home Assistant hub is on your local network. The API calls from Hey Boo to HA go directly from the Lambda function to your hub's URL. No home data is stored in Hey Boo's systems.

Through Home Assistant, Hey Boo can control any of 3,000+ supported device types: lights (Philips Hue, LIFX, Zigbee, Kasa, Govee), locks (August, Schlage, Yale), thermostats (Nest, Ecobee, Honeywell), security cameras, motion and door sensors, appliances, robotic mowers (Husqvarna Automower, Worx Landroid), garage doors, ceiling fans, and much more.

If Home Assistant supports it, Hey Boo can control it. See the full list at home-assistant.io/integrations/.

For smart-home control, yes. Home Assistant is Hey Boo's smart-home layer. Without a provisioned HA hub, smart-home commands run in dry-run mode — you see the exact API calls that would fire, but they don't execute.

Hey Boo's business service routing, conversational brain, and Boojee service navigation all work without Home Assistant. Only the smart-home control requires HA.

Start right now — no account required. Visit boojee.estate/heyboo/ for the command console (type or tap the mic). Visit boojee.estate/heyboo/app/ for the mobile-optimized voice PWA.

For smart-home control: install Home Assistant on a Raspberry Pi or HA Green hub, generate a long-lived access token, and provide HA_URL + HA_TOKEN to the system. See the full setup guide.

The Hey Boo command console and voice PWA are free — no account required. Smart-home control requires your own Home Assistant setup (free, open-source). The Lambda intent brain runs on your AWS account at minimal cost (cents per month at personal use volumes).

Future premium features (agent orchestration, proactive briefings, specialist agent delegation) may require a Boojee Estate subscription. Any paid tier will be clearly labeled.

Partially. The local JavaScript classifier (HeybooIntents) works without internet for common command routing. Smart-home control via a local Home Assistant hub works without internet once configured (the HA hub is local). The Lambda brain (Nova) requires internet. Web Speech API voice input requires internet in most browsers. Full offline operation is a future goal.

Currently, Hey Boo is English-only. The intent registry, scene library, and voice output are all English (en-US). Multi-language support is not on the near-term roadmap but is a future consideration as the product matures.