Logitech Harmony Express

» see logitech.com/harmony as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the harmony express never reached turkey at the alexa layer. amazon's voice assistant did not have turkish in '19 and the alexa hardware ecosystem the express depended on was an english-speaking consumer-electronics thing. i had a regular harmony remote on the home tv setup, the one with buttons. the express was a different category. it had three buttons, a mic, and a cloud.

logitech announced the express at ces '19 and shipped it on april 25 at $249.99. the press kit pitched it as the death of the button-soup remote, you would just talk to it. the hardware was a small wand with a touch surface, the brain was a hub that sat behind the tv with ir blasters. the actual decision tree ran in amazon's cloud, logitech's cloud, the alexa skill plumbing in between.

in fairness. the launch reviews were polite. the engadget review called it pretty but unfinished, the verge said the voice handoff between the hub and alexa took two seconds too long. the cnet review noted that the remote had no real backup for when the voice misheard you. for some reason that last point is what killed the device. if alexa heard "watch hbo" as "watch hgtv", you had to start the sentence over from the top, there was no physical channel-up button to bail with.

by spring '20 logitech had pulled the express from new harmony software updates and stopped restocking retailers. on july 10 '20 the company emailed remaining customers and posted to its support site that all express service would end on september 30. logitech offered either a free upgrade to a harmony elite or a full refund of the purchase price. the cloud went dark on the announced day and every express on a shelf became inert plastic in the same hour.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it actually was ~

this part i had to look up. the express was an experiment in stripping a universal remote down to nothing but voice. the wand had a power button, a mic button, a small touch zone for volume. everything else was an alexa command. logitech believed the average household had moved past the 30-button remote and would prefer to talk. amazon agreed and put alexa branding on the box. the actual purchase flow asked you to set up alexa first, then harmony, then the hub, then the activities. four account hops before you could change a channel.

~ the decline ~

the cracks were the cloud. the harmony cloud and the alexa cloud both had to be online for the remote to do anything. when one went down the remote went deaf. that was rare but it happened. the second crack was the voice model. alexa in '19 was good at music and timers, less good at turning a soundbar to input 3 while ducking the lights to 40 percent. logitech's published activity macros covered the obvious ones, custom activities you set up yourself were a coin flip on whether voice would route to them.

~ how it actually ended ~

logitech told customers in plain words. expectations were not met. that was the corporate phrasing in the support post. on september 30 '20 the cloud connection went away and the express stopped responding to voice. the hub kept working as a dumb ir blaster if you paired it with a phone, but the remote in your hand was scrap. logitech honored the refund offer through the end of the year, the harmony brand itself was sunset for new production in april '21 with cloud support for the rest of the line carrying on until may 28 '25. the express was the first of the harmonies to go and the only one that died inside its own product cycle.

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