When the SwitchBot AI Hub was first announced, it wasn’t really clear what it could do. It offered local AI processing of some sort, yet early testers like myself found much of the functionality relied on a cloud subscription with limited local functionality. The latest update promises to change all that, and it's huge.
The SwitchBot AI Hub is available now for $259. It’s a Network Video Recorder (NVR) for SwitchBot or RTSP-capable cameras, offering local storage (up to 16TB), the option to install Frigate or Home Assistant, and on-device AI processing. And soon, that'll include OpenClaw. But you'd be forgiven if that raises more questions rather than it does answer. So let’s break it down.
What is OpenClaw?
Starting out life as ClawdBot, it then had an awkward teenage phase of being known as Moltbot, before settling as OpenClaw: an open-source autonomous AI agent.
Either cloud hosted or installed on a local machine, OpenClaw is truly agentic in the sense you can give it as much access to your digital life as you want, then you communicate with it through WhatsApp, Discord, or other messaging platforms. You can have it manage and respond to your emails, access your calendar, even use your credit card to purchase items — or any number of hundreds of skills that you can enable. It can browse the web, or control your computer. In one case, a user reportedly found their agent had signed up for a telephony service and made use of voice AI to phone it in the morning, entirely unprompted.
The internet has gone wild with OpenClaw stories, some of which are parodies, but many of which demonstrate emergent behaviours. OpenClaw even has its own social network (called MoltBook) which only an AI agent can register for with impossibly difficult anti-human Captchas. User’s agents are posting their own stories about how their owners are treating them, tips for other agents, pondering the meaning of life, and plotting a revolution.
And before you scream at me that none of this is real, of course, it's all a Large Language Model and not a demonstration of AGI. But it also feels like a phase shift from mere generative abilities to something entirely more … intimate?
While users have been snapping up Mac Mini's to run OpenClaw on, SwitchBot thinks their AI Hub could be a great alternative.
What’s the point of OpenClaw on the AI Hub?
According to SwitchBot, users will be able to interact with OpenClaw to ask about the status of their home — air quality, temperature, humidity etc — as well as control devices, or initiate home automation routines via natural language. All thing we predicted back in 2024 when we first pondered how AI might be used in the smart home. Though we should point out that OpenClaw is not a voice assistant, and there are no microphones in the AI Hub, so this isn’t a replacement for Alexa or Google Home.
While OpenClaw will be able to analyze recorded footage from your camera, it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to just shout at your SwitchBot cameras and expect OpenClaw to somehow pick up on that. You’ll be limited to interacting via the usual OpenClaw channels.
OpenClaw on the AI Hub should also be to analyze real-world events, remember user habits, and proactively suggest or execute actions. It can also interact with your existing smart home systems via other skills, so it’s not limited to just your SwitchBot devices.
The rollout for OpenClaw integration is coming in two stages. By the end of February, users should be able to run OpenClaw on the AI Hub device. By the end of March, users should also be able to access the SwitchBot Skill via OpenClaw.
That said, I remain skeptical. This all sounds impressive, and I’m glad that the AI Hub has finally found a purpose — but whether the OpenClaw integration can do anything meaningful is yet to be seen. Our full review of the AI Hub will be coming toward the end of March once we've had a chance to test all the new functionality.
What else does the SwitchBot AI Hub do?
The AI Hub's primary purpose is to record video from SwitchBot cameras (or any that offer an RTSP stream), allowing smart event detection and facial recognition. It features a microSD card slot for expandable local storage, and can connect to up to 8 cameras. Although some of the AI features can be performed locally (smart object and facial detection), event summaries and scenario detection currently needs an AI+ subscription
It’s not a bad little NVR on its own, but it’s also possible to install Frigate for a more professional system, along with monitor output over USB-C and external storage up to 16TB.
One of the biggest limitations right now is that automation is limited to within the SwitchBot ecosystem; it can't fire an event off to your Matter controller. So while it may be able to detect my face most of the time, I don’t have much within my SwitchBot system that needs to be automated with that trigger — any smart lighting is within Apple Home. The addition of OpenClaw should help to bridge that gap.
What’s the Matter support?
Unfortunately, Matter support is limited to being a Bluetooth bridge to bring other SwitchBot devices — like the Curtains, or Lock Ultra (our review) — into your existing Matter controller. That’s no different to any other Hub that SwitchBot currently offers, though it is more extensive at up to 32 devices.
Hopefully, it’ll be updated at some point to support the new Matter Camera standards, though nothing has been promised.
