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, and builders who want every home to start out already known.

Request early access to a Singer Intelligent Homes box and Charyl Cloud, or ask your builder whether they're part of the Charyl builder pilot.

Charyl comes with the Charyl Cloud subscription, and its pricing will be announced at launch.

Charyl is in invited early access: the box, Charyl Cloud, and the mobile app.

A Singer Intelligent Homes box, which we set up for you, plus your home network and Charyl Cloud.

No. Charyl's My Home 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.

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

Charyl walks you through your login, naming your home, connecting to Charyl Cloud, 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 live on your home's box; they aren't separate Charyl Cloud accounts.

Through Home Assistant (you choose what to bring in, at setup or with Sync with Home Assistant), or our own sensor nodes, which announce themselves 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 service 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.

Tap the microphone in the mobile app, say it, check it, and send it — she 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 its own one-tap confirm, and that tap covers exactly the action she showed you — nothing more.

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, such as maintenance coming due.

The app is in early access — invited iOS testers get a TestFlight invitation, and invited Android testers get a Google Play test link. There's no public store listing yet.

Everything you'd expect from talking to Charyl on the web, plus photo capture on the go and a notification inbox.

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 — the app reaches your home through Charyl Cloud's relay, at home or away, once your home is connected to Charyl Cloud. Live view in the app is part of the subscription.

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 meant to catch an impostor between your phone and your home — 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 the mobile app's relay run through Charyl Cloud.

Where it is on your home network, and a random ID for the box, so charyl.net/start can take your browser to it. Nothing about your home. It starts before you sign in.

In a few specific ways, listed here: our relay, Charyl Cloud, updates, and a repair key can reach the box without asking you each time, and a box sent back to us is readable.

Your backups, no — we hold ciphertext, not the key. Much of the rest passes through us, and there we protect it by policy, not cryptography. Here is where, place by place.

Your request passes through us to a named provider bound not to train on it, without your account attached. What it carries goes too — a record or floor plan can include a name or address.

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.

The platform that runs your home lives on your box and keeps working without the cloud. Charyl's conversations, and her product research, run through Charyl Cloud.

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, the relay the mobile app uses, mobile push, and updates, bundled as one subscription rather than sold piece by piece.

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

Research, the mobile app, cloud chat, backups, push, and updates need Charyl Cloud. Everything else — inventory, devices, manuals, Home Records — works without it, in the web app.

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. In the web app, Charyl tells you Charyl Cloud is paused for your home.

From Settings → Charyl Cloud & backup, 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.

No. Charyl comes with the Charyl Cloud subscription, and every tier is paid once pricing is announced.

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.

Get the whole label in the frame, up close, keep it in focus, and avoid glare — 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.

Tell Charyl what's wrong — type /bug in chat and you'll see exactly what's included before it sends. We reply within one business day. There's no phone line and no live chat today.

Check two things in order: is the box reachable, and is your Charyl Cloud subscription 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.

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.

Updates are health-checked automatically and roll themselves back — a break usually means it already recovered.

Go to charyl.net/start on a computer at home. If that page can't see your box, try charyl.local:8080, then use your phone and the label on the box to read its address.

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.