Smart Home Data Privacy: Skylight Calendar
Spring is my busy season. Since my kids were old enough to play team sports, the impending arrival of March brings an avalanche of organizational tasks. Practice schedules, game schedules, and snack signups equal so many dates to remember. They arrive in different ways — paper flyers, Excel sheets, text chains, or through yet another team sports app — but somehow never in a Google Calendar link. It’s a trying time.
But this year, I have a new assistant: Sidekick, an AI-powered planning feature for the Skylight Calendar. I just forward every lengthy email to my Sidekick and upload pictures of schedules and spreadsheets to its app. From there, the AI parses the data, packages it into events, and pushes those to my Google Calendar and to my family’s calendars on the big, bright, 27-inch Skylight Calendar Max smart display that’s mounted by our breakfast counter for all to see.
I’m now prepared to tackle two high school sports seasons, along with all the other scheduling chaos that comes with being a busy working parent to two busy teens. It has taken a decade and significant advances in AI to get here, but parents, this is a game-changer.
The Skylight Calendar Max
The Skylight Calendar Max next to the Echo Show 21. The Show can be wall-mounted or tabletop-mounted, the Cal Max can only go on the wall. The Cal Max has a better calendar interface.
Smart Home Data Privacy
It’s important to note that when you use Skylight, the company has access to any data you store on the device. Skylight says it follows all industry best practices to protect that data.
“[O]ur systems do need to ‘see’ that data, but we follow industry best practices in terms of customer privacy, including but not limited to:
• Encrypting all data in transit and at rest
• Explicitly requesting permission from customers to access their data if their support request requires it
• Using best-in-class systems for storing and cycling those encryption keys
• Never storing data that we don’t need
• Never using that data for any purpose other than serving the customer
• Allowing customers to delete all of their data from our database with a few taps
• Regularly hiring third-party auditors to review our code and infrastructure for vulnerabilities”
Competitors
Another more direct competitor to the Skylight Calendar is the Hearth display, which I haven’t tested. It’s the same size as the Skylight, but at $699, it’s more expensive. It does have Hearth Helper, an AI assistant that can import events from flyers and such if you send a photo of it via text. This costs $9 a month ($86.40 a year), almost double Skylight’s fee.
Conclusion
Sidekick brings another level of utility to the Skylight Calendar’s already good hardware. Yes, it’s a big screen running Android, and yes, Gemini and ChatGPT et al. could surpass Sidekick’s schedule parsing abilities one day soon. Yes, it is dependent on Wi-Fi, and if the company goes out of business, you may be left with a big, defunct screen. Skylight tells me if this happened, it “would find a creative way to support all existing products out in the wild.”
But the Skylight team has created a compelling product for corralling the chaos of family schedules. If that’s something you need, and you don’t want to spend time creating a DIY version with a monitor powered by a Raspberry Pi and running DAKboard (as one Verge commenter suggested), this is an out-of-the-box solution that works very well.
FAQs
Q: What is the cost of the Skylight Calendar?
A: The cost of the Skylight Calendar Max is $399.
Q: How does the Skylight Calendar work?
A: The Skylight Calendar works by importing data from various sources, such as email, spreadsheets, and text messages, and then displaying that data on the calendar.
Q: What is Sidekick?
A: Sidekick is an AI-powered planning feature for the Skylight Calendar that helps to parse data and package it into events.
Q: Is the Skylight Calendar secure?
A: Yes, the Skylight Calendar is secure, as the company follows all industry best practices to protect customer data.
Q: Are there any competitors to the Skylight Calendar?
A: Yes, there are competitors to the Skylight Calendar, such as the Hearth display, which has a similar feature set but is more expensive.
