Harold
Harold One — the light remote
Two buttons. Every light in the house..
One piece of machined aluminum. A 1.91-inch AMOLED display. Two buttons that do exactly what you expect, and AI voice control out of the box. Harold One controls every light in your home, and it works with Apple Home, Google Home, and Alexa on day one.
We automated the house and made turning on a lamp harder than it was in 1962.
Somewhere in the last decade, the light switch stopped being a switch. It became a login. You pick up a phone, unlock it, find an app, wait for the app to find your hub, wait for the hub to find the bulb, and then — finally — you dim the living room. Guests can't do it. Children can't do it. The babysitter texts you about it. A house full of intelligence, and the simplest act in domestic life now takes six seconds and a working internet connection.
Harold One is the correction. It is a remote for light and nothing else, built on the premise that the fastest interface is the one already in your hand. No app to open. No voice to raise. No wake word, no waiting, no explaining to anyone how your house works. You press, the room changes. That is the whole product, and that is the point.
Two buttons
Restraint is a feature. We shipped two buttons and refused to add a third.
Press to move through your rooms and fixtures. Hold to jump to a scene. The display shows one thing at a time, in type large enough to read at arm's length, so you are never deciding between nine options — you are confirming the one in front of you.
Press to toggle. Hold and the button becomes a dimmer, ramping smoothly from candlelight to full output with the tactile resolution of a volume knob. Release at the level you want. Harold remembers it as the new default for that room, at that hour.
Every other function lives on the screen — where it can change, improve, and get out of the way — instead of on the body, where it would live forever as a button you press once and never again.
The display
A 1.91-inch AMOLED that is black until you need it.
AMOLED does not backlight black — it simply doesn't light those pixels. So Harold One shows you a single room name, a single brightness bar, and nothing else, floating on true black under the glass. Lift the remote and the display wakes. Set it down and it disappears into the body, leaving an unbroken black window in a bar of aluminum. No glow across a dark living room. No standby light blinking at you from the coffee table.
Because the interface is software, your house can get better without you buying anything. New scenes appear as tiles. A fixture you rename in Apple Home is renamed here. The screen is the only part of Harold One that changes, which is exactly how it should be — the hardware is finished, and the software is never done.
- Display
- 1.91″ AMOLED, 320 × 172, true black, always-off by default
- Body
- 136 × 35 × 9.5 mm machined aluminum unibody, 58 g
- Controls
- Two machined push buttons, press and hold, haptic confirm
- Battery
- Months per charge, USB-C, charges while you sleep
Works with what you already own
Apple Home, Google Home, and Alexa. Not one of them. All three.
Harold One speaks Matter and Thread natively, which means it joins your home the way a light bulb does — directly, over a local mesh, without a bridge of ours sitting between you and your house.
Your rooms, fixtures, and scenes arrive already named and already organized. Hold Set and you are dimming the same group Siri would.
Structure and automations carry over intact. Harold One acts as a local controller, so it keeps working through a router reboot or an outage.
Every group and routine you have built is on the remote. Press instead of asking — for the times when the room is quiet, or the baby is asleep.
If you later switch ecosystems, you do not switch remotes. Harold One is the one piece of your smart home that does not care which company won.
AI voice, out of the box
Hold both buttons and just say it. No wake word, no shouting across the room.
Press and hold Select and Set together and Harold One listens. Speak at a conversational volume, an arm's length away, into a remote in your hand — not at a speaker in the corner. On-screen you see the words as they land, so you know it heard you before the room changes. Release, and it acts.
The AI understands the way people actually describe light. "Make it warmer in here." "Too bright." "Just the reading lamp." "Set it for a movie." It resolves the room you are standing in, the fixtures that belong to it, and the level you usually pick at this hour — then does it in one step, without you naming a single device or scene.
Voice works the moment you pair the remote. No account, no skill to enable, no training your own phrases first.
The microphone only opens while both buttons are held. There is no always-listening mode to turn off, because there isn't one.
Prefer Siri, Google Assistant, or Alexa? Point voice at any of them in a single setting. Harold One hands off and stays out of the way.
Two buttons for the things you do every day. Your voice for the one time a month you want something specific. Nothing in between.
In the hand
Cut from one billet, finished so you can find it in the dark.
136 by 35 by 9.5 millimetres — slim enough to sit in a jacket pocket, long enough to balance across four fingers with your thumb resting naturally between the two buttons. The edges are chamfered and polished; the back is bead-blasted to a low sheen that stays fingerprint-free and grips without rubber. There is one seam on the entire object, and it is the glass.
Both buttons are machined aluminum, domed by a tenth of a millimetre so your thumb can tell them apart blind. They travel a real distance and stop with a defined click, backed by a haptic tick that confirms the room responded — not that the button moved. You will use this remote in a dark room more than a lit one, and it was designed for that case first.
The rest of the industry added features. We removed everything that wasn't light.
Harold One does one job perfectly, for everyone in the house, without a tutorial. Put it on the table where the phone used to be needed.