Flic 2 Makes Starting Your Morning Routine as Easy as Pushing a Button

Smart home voice assistants, like the Amazon Echo and the Google Home, promise to simplify your life by letting you perform all sorts of tasks with just a voice command. That’s great for a lot of scenarios, like when you want to know how many cups are in a quart. But it’s still a hassle to speak out loud just to perform the same tasks you need done every day. That’s why Flic 2 makes controlling anything as easy as pushing a button.

Flic 2 is, as you’d expect, the successor to the Flic smart button. It recently launched on Kickstarter, and has already reached more than six times its funding goal. At first glance, the Flic 2 looks very simple — it’s just a small button. But that’s the whole point of the Flic 2’s design philosophy; its entire purpose is to make your life as simple as possible. Inside the tiny button is a low-power microcontroller with long-range Bluetooth capability, a long-lasting battery, and a three-color notification LED. By pairing the Flic 2 with a smartphone app, your computer, or the Flic Hub LR, you can use that minimal amount of hardware to control and automate just about anything in your life.

As an example, let’s say you want to do three things when your alarm goes off in the morning: turn off the alarm, start playing your favorite news podcast, and turn on the coffee maker. To do that, you’d simply pair your Flic 2 button with the smartphone app, and select those functions. The app has integrations with dozens of popular services, so you can control just about any IoT device. If you don’t want to use your smartphone, the Flic 2 can also be paired with the Flic Hub LR, your computer, third party hardware like Arduino, and even MIDI devices. The Flic team is making the SDKs available for anyone to use, so you can also create your own completely custom interactions.

If you want a Flic 2, the Kickstarter campaign will be running until June 20th. Backers can get a single Flic 2 button for $25, which is 15% off of the retail price. Rewards are expected to be delivered in September.