FAQ

Charyl is the AI at the heart of Singer Intelligent Homes — she keeps a working record of your house and answers for it.

Charyl is the product — the AI you talk to. Singer Intelligent Homes is the company that builds and stands behind her.

Anything about what's in your home, what it needs, and — where you've connected devices — the lights, switches, and fans.

Homeowners who want a running record of their house, technical self-hosters, and builders who want every home to start out already known.

Request early access to a Singer Intelligent Homes box and Charyl Cloud, or self-host on your own Linux server — free, with access to the private images during the testing period.

Self-hosting Charyl is free. Charyl Cloud's pricing will be announced at launch.

Self-hosting is available today. The managed box, Charyl Cloud, and the mobile app are in invited early access.

A Singer Intelligent Homes box, or your own always-on Linux server — plus a network connection and a bit of disk space.

No. Charyl's household side — inventory, warranties, manuals, maintenance, home records — works with zero connected devices.

A proposal is a drafted change Charyl prepares but never applies until you tap to approve it.

Three paths today: an early-access appliance, free self-hosting on Linux, or a home pre-loaded by a builder — a Windows installer is planned.

A small, pre-imaged computer that runs Charyl's full stack at home — early access, no model name or price published yet.

Yes — Docker Engine on a Linux server you already own runs the same stack the appliance does, free. During the testing period the images are private, so ask us for access first.

Not yet — a no-Docker Windows installer is designed but not built; self-hosting today means a Linux machine.

Charyl walks you through naming your home, choosing how she runs, and connecting your smart home — one narrated step at a time.

Sign in during setup, or later from Settings — the same tab redirects you back, already paired, with no key to copy.

Charyl finds it on your network, walks you through a token, and previews the devices before bringing any in.

Yes — a bundled copy runs from first boot, adopted quietly if you have none, or set aside if you already do.

Scan a QR code from the app, sign in, and confirm a short code on both screens the first time.

Yes — an admin creates a login and role for each person; those logins stay local to your home, not Charyl Cloud.

Through Home Assistant, or our own sensor nodes — both show up automatically once connected, with no manual pairing.

Today Charyl keeps one home — moving means a fresh setup, and owning several homes under one account isn't built yet.

Photograph the nameplate, or just describe it — Charyl drafts a proposal you review and approve.

The nameplate or model sticker first — that one photo is what lets Charyl identify the exact appliance.

She answers from the manuals attached to your own appliances and cites the page — she doesn't hand out a library of manuals.

She links warranty terms to your appliances, can look coverage up for you, and can tell you what's expiring soon.

Tell her what happened in a sentence — she drafts a maintenance record for you to approve.

The place for your home's paperwork — insurance, HOA rules, deed, mortgage, permits — searchable and cited, free for every home.

Charyl can see a private record exists and when it's dated, but not what's inside it, unless you open that record up.

Yes — ask her to remember something and she'll keep it across conversations, and forgets on request.

Research is Charyl looking a product up in Singer Intelligent Homes' researched knowledge — it needs Charyl Cloud.

Yes — she checks who you've already used first, then a researched directory with Charyl Cloud, then falls back to a map search.

Review the card in chat or your proposal inbox, then approve or reject with a tap — nothing is real before that.

A dock on every page of the web app, her own full page, or the Charyl tab in the mobile app.

Press and hold to talk to her in the mobile app — she shows you what she heard before it sends, and can read her answers back.

She won't operate a home's security hardware — doors, garages, covers — or its climate control, and she never acts without your approval.

She can switch, dim, recolor, and set presets on lights, switches, and fans, with a confirmation tap — anything that secures the house stays with the app.

Every device action waits for a one-tap confirm — after that, similar commands in the same conversation get a 90-second trust window before she asks again.

Yes — devices, sensors, rules, and notifications are handled by the platform underneath her, and keep running whether or not the AI is reachable.

Temperature, humidity, pressure, ambient light, and presence — she answers in summaries you can ask for in conversation; trend charts live on the dashboard.

She can pull up a snapshot, list recent events, open live view, and snooze doorbell alerts — she does not look at or describe what's in the picture.

Yes — describe what you want and she drafts it, appends cards, or edits an existing one; anything structural asks for a confirm, and deleting asks you to type the name.

No — she sits alongside the Home Assistant you already run, importing its devices and letting your home's own sensors publish back to it.

Not natively, not yet — Matter support is planned. Home Assistant is the first-class integration today, and whatever reaches it is what Charyl can see.

A floor plan of your home built room by room, with your real devices placed where they actually are — you can draw it by hand or describe a room to Charyl.

Yes, two ways — rules you set up yourself that name the device, and Charyl's own generic nudges about warranties, maintenance, and things worth adding.

The app is in early access — invited iOS testers get a TestFlight invitation, and Android testers are set up directly by our team. There's no public store listing yet.

Everything you'd expect from talking to Charyl on the web, plus photo capture on the go, a notification inbox, and dashboards that render right on your phone.

Snap a photo and walk away — Charyl works on it in the background and lets you know inside the app the moment there's something to review.

It depends who sent it — Charyl's own pushes stay generic on purpose, but a device rule you wrote yourself names the device, because you already know what it's about.

Yes — your phone and your home find each other through Charyl Cloud's relay, with nothing to configure. Remote camera live view needs the subscription; everything else doesn't.

Yes — biometric unlock is a quick, local gate on top of your already-signed-in session. It doesn't change how you sign in to your home in the first place.

It's a one-time check that your phone is really talking to your own home, not an impostor in between — you compare a short code on both screens before the phone is trusted.

The platform that runs your home — devices, sensors, rules — lives on your box. Charyl's chat and research, backups, and remote access run through Charyl Cloud.

Your backups, no — we hold ciphertext, not the key. Chat that reaches a cloud AI provider is seen by that provider to answer you, de-identified, never as content by us.

Your request passes through us to a named provider bound not to train on it. The provider sees the question, never the customer — a prompt, not a person.

Yes — encrypted inside your house before they leave, with a key only you hold. Our servers store ciphertext; we can hand it back, but we can't open it.

If your box is still alive, you can reset the phrase without the old one. Lose both the box and the phrase, and no one — including us — can recover your data.

On self-hosted hardware capable of running a local model, yes — chat can stay on your own machine. On the box today, chat routes through Charyl Cloud by default.

Yes — every proposal she drafts and every device action she takes waits for your tap, then lands in an audit trail: her own activity log, plus your proposals history.

We don't name a vendor in the product's ordinary copy — the current provider is named where it actually matters: the app's first-use notice and our privacy policy.

On singer-homes.com — our privacy policy, terms, and security page are the canonical legal documents for the whole product, including Charyl.

Charyl Cloud is the subscription behind Charyl — the AI, research, backups, remote access, mobile push, and updates, bundled as one subscription rather than sold piece by piece.

The AI behind Charyl's answers, product research, automatic backups, remote access through the relay, mobile push, and automatic updates — one subscription, nothing to assemble.

Research, remote camera live view, cloud chat, automatic cloud backups, push, and updates need Charyl Cloud. Everything else — inventory, devices, manuals, Home Records — works without it.

Not announced yet — pricing comes at launch. The direction is tiers that differ by how much you use Charyl, not by what she can do.

Charyl's chat goes quiet — the rest of your box keeps running exactly as before. Today the app doesn't yet explain this state clearly; we're fixing that.

From Settings → Cloud, or the Charyl Cloud customer portal. Cancelling defers to the end of the current calendar month, and you can undo it any time before then.

Not a free Charyl Cloud tier, no — but self-hosting is free, real, and available today, and it's not a crippled version of the product.

Be specific, name the room or item, and ask one thing at a time — she asks a clarifying question rather than guessing.

Ask what's in a room, ask how the home is doing overall, or photograph a nameplate and let her draft the record.

Type /bug or /request in chat — she shows you exactly what will be sent before anything leaves your home.

Clear room names are how she resolves questions like 'what's in the kitchen' — and they're the same names shown on your home map.

Fill the frame, keep it in focus, and avoid glare on the nameplate — the model and serial number are what she actually needs to read.

Just tell her in chat what's wrong — for a saved record she drafts a fix, for a memory say 'forget', for an unsaved proposal reject it.

Attach a photo or PDF in chat — she can file it as a Home Record or attach it to an asset. Sharing your copy to help other households isn't built yet.

Two things you can do — /bug and /request — each with a couple of aliases. Nothing else is a special command — everything else is just conversation.

Check three things in order: is the box reachable, what chat route is active, and whether your subscription (if you rely on Charyl Cloud) is still active.

A search that comes back empty usually means nothing cleared the similarity bar, not that the document is missing — try rephrasing, or check the document list directly.

Give both services a minute to finish restarting, then re-run the connection test in Settings. If it still won't connect, the community board is the place to ask.

Push notifications need both a completed phone pairing and an active Charyl Cloud subscription — check the pairing status and your subscription first.

Set two variables in your .env file, restart once, log in, then remove them — there's no email-based password reset today.

The fix is the same regardless of cause: forget the home on your phone, then pair again the same way you did the first time.

If you're on Charyl Cloud, updates are health-checked automatically and roll themselves back — a break usually means it already recovered. Self-hosting without a subscription, updates are manual.

Try the box's LAN IP address directly if its friendly name doesn't resolve — that name only works on a Linux Docker host, not Mac or Windows.

A pilot: every home you build comes with Charyl already knowing it, at closing — with nothing extra for your team to do.

Nothing beyond the spec sheets and documents you already produce — we handle the capture, the install, and supporting the homeowner ourselves.

A home whose appliances, warranties, and manuals Charyl already knows — plus twelve months of her subscription included, before the homeowner decides on their own.

A one-time setup fee per home, quoted per project — we contract with your company directly.

The homeowner decides — if they continue, it's their own Charyl Cloud subscription, and you're never billed for it.

It's in pilot — we're beginning with a small number of builders rather than opening broadly. The form on /builders is where that starts.

Not yet — today the handoff is a hands-on service our team performs from the documents you already produce. Direct integration is on our roadmap.

The same six sentences we stand behind everywhere: she proposes and the owner approves, the home runs without her, and backups leave the house already encrypted.

The inquiry form at /builders — your company, market, and build volume. There's no other back channel to route around it.

Charyl's living instruction hub — the FAQ, guides, and community board for the AI at the heart of Singer Intelligent Homes, kept honest with dated, sourced answers.

Singer Intelligent Homes, a small studio based in Kansas.

Every answer carries a verified date and internal sources, an automated check screens out language we don't allow ourselves to use, and corrections come from you.

Post it on the community board, or use /bug inside Charyl if it's about something the product itself does.

charyl.net is Charyl's own hub — FAQ, guides, and the community board. singer-homes.com is the company site and the canonical home for legal pages.