Nest's primary strategy with the Protect was never to improve the user experience of the smoke/CO detector. Like you said, they are devices that you ideally hav

Nest's primary strategy with the Protect was never to improve the user experience of the smoke/CO detector. Like you said, they are devices that you ideally have zero interaction with until the day they are required - at which point they mustn't fail. The whole point of the Protect was to get a speaker, microphone and some sensors in every room in a house. It's an obvious requirement for any company with ambitions of winning the connected home. Tweaking lights and thermostat settings from your phone is clearly a stopgap solution. The endgame here is Star Trek style interaction: "Computer - turn the AC down a few degrees." It was a brilliant ploy and would have worked perfectly except they flubbed the core functionality with various bugs. Normally, that's not a big deal with consumer electronics, but the market is very unforgiving when safety products fail.