Cortana-powered Thermostat Quietly Debuts

There are several WiFi enabled thermostats on the market today with the Nest being the one most people are familiar with. These thermostats allow you more control over the temperature in your home to save money and electricity. Microsoft is the latest company to step into the smart thermostat realm with its GLAS thermostat developed by Johnson Controls and it features Microsoft’s Cortana virtual assistant.

Microsoft didn’t make any real effort to let people know that the thermostat had launched. GLAS quietly surfaced in a YouTube video reports TechCrunch. You can see that video at the bottom of this story. What you can glean from that video is that the GLAS device has a touchscreen that allows manual control of the thermostat and allows you to see at a glance what the heating and cooling system is doing.

The device has sensors and can tell if people are in a room or not, presumably to allow it to adjust temperatures to save money and be more efficient. The GLAS device uses Windows 10 IoT Core and promises support for Azure cloud services. Exactly what cloud services it will support we don’t know. A couple important items that are lacking about the GLAS device include pricing and availability.

Microsoft has promised in the past that it would open access to Cortana voice assistant to third party companies. Before GLAS the only other product teased with Cortana voice capability was a Harman Kardon smart speaker that the company talked about last year. The big downside I have always seen to smart thermostats is that in many very hot or very cold climates, if you turn the heating or cooling off when no one is around, the system has a difficult or impossible time catching up to cool down or heat up the home once you are there.