Tom Coates
Projects Talks Writing About
Projects / Thington

Thington

A conversational service layer for a world of connected devices — talk to your things instead of hunting through apps.

Device
Vendor
Command
Response
Lamp
Philips Hue
"Turn it on"
Lamp's on.
Thermostat
Nest
"Bit warmer"
Set to 21°.
Lock
August
"Lock up"
Front door locked.
Turn the living room lamp on
Done — lamp's on. Want the heating on too? It's a bit chilly in there.

By 2015 it was clear the "internet of things" was going to arrive as a pile of disconnected apps — one for the lights, one for the thermostat, one for the lock — each demanding its own login and its own home-screen icon. Thington's bet was that the right interface for a house full of things wasn't an app at all. It was a conversation.

Underneath the plain-language commands sat a service layer that could talk to dozens of different device platforms and normalise them into something a person could address without knowing or caring which company had made the hardware.

IMG PLACEHOLDER — Lamp
IMG PLACEHOLDER — Thermostat
IMG PLACEHOLDER — Lock
IMG PLACEHOLDER — Speaker
Year
2015
Company
Thington Inc.
Platform
iOS · Messaging
© 1999–2026 Tom Coates
Index