LAS VEGAS – Here's something you don't see every day: a company that's spent more than a decade operating exclusively in the background is finally stepping into the spotlight.
Tuya Inc. (TUYA), the artificial intelligence of things platform that's been quietly powering smart devices for years, just unveiled its first consumer-facing product at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The offering is called Hey Tuya AI Assistant For Life, and it represents a pretty significant strategic shift for a company that's built its entire business serving brands, OEMs, AI agents, system integrators and software vendors rather than regular people.
If you wandered the CES show floor this year, you couldn't miss the AI buzz. Every booth seemed to be touting some intelligent gadget or service that combines internet connectivity with supercharged computing power. Tuya has been playing in both those sandboxes for years, first as an internet of things provider helping companies get their products online, then evolving into an AI cloud platform that makes those connected devices actually smart.
The Hey Tuya branding was displayed prominently above the company's booth space during its eighth appearance at the show. But the product itself is still being tested, with a full rollout expected sometime later this year.
What Exactly Is Hey Tuya?
Alex Yang, co-founder, COO and CFO of Tuya Smart, sat down with Bamboo Works at CES to explain what the company is building. Think of it as an AI assistant focused on your physical life rather than just your digital one.
"It's the first consumer-facing product that we've provided. But it's consumer and developer-facing together," Yang explained. "Hey Tuya is an AI Assistant For Life helping people to take care of their lives. It's a physical life, right? Living in the real world. So, the assistant will be able to cover most of the scenarios you're going to meet at home, including your calendar, your to-dos, your health, and how you interact with most of your own home devices."
The goal is straightforward: make daily life easier by creating a virtual assistant that can interact with both internet services and physical devices. Which sounds like a lot of other AI assistants out there, except Tuya has one massive advantage.
The Secret Weapon: A Decade of Connections
When asked about competition, Yang laughed. "There is no one providing the same type of services as us. That's the special value proposition Tuya is making. We offer a platform open for developers. We are the enablers helping people to make their innovations easier."
Here's where Tuya's B2B history becomes incredibly valuable. Over the past decade, the company has helped more than 7,000 brands build nearly 900 million connected devices. That's not a typo. Nine hundred million devices. And the first version of Hey Tuya will be compatible with around 60% of all those existing smart home gadgets.
That compatibility matters because it solves the classic smart home problem: getting everything to actually work together. Tuya isn't starting from scratch trying to convince device makers to adopt its standard. The devices are already out there, already using Tuya's technology. Hey Tuya just becomes the interface layer sitting on top of that massive installed base.
Plus, Tuya emphasizes that all its capabilities are open to its 1.6 million developers worldwide who are building all kinds of different applications. So Hey Tuya serves as both a consumer product and a reference implementation showing developers what's possible.
The Challenges Ahead
Yang was refreshingly candid about the obstacles Tuya faces. The first one is pretty fundamental: smart home penetration is still remarkably low. Only six or seven percent of home devices are actually connected to the internet, which means the market is still in its early stages.
"So, the first challenge is how we can speed up the cross-terminal or cross-device experience and speed up penetration of the entire global market," Yang said.
The second challenge involves AI itself. "One of the key changes for AI is not how you can build things upon it, but also how you use it to build the application as well," he noted. "So, the second challenge is how fast we can continuously identify the right scenarios that people need and the right capabilities and the right path to get there."
In other words, having the technology is one thing. Figuring out what consumers actually want to do with it is another challenge entirely.
How Tuya Makes Money
Tuya currently operates three different business models, which Yang laid out clearly.
The first is platform-as-a-service, helping device makers convert legacy products into smart devices. "That business model is very old school," Yang acknowledged.
The second is turnkey solutions for companies entering the smart device space without much technical expertise. Yang used toys as an example: "Some toy companies know nothing about electronics or software engineering. So, in the beginning we offer them a turnkey solution" that includes both hardware design and all the necessary software.
The third model is software-as-a-service, which targets end users directly with recurring subscriptions. "While you have the essential feature sets on devices, you can activate smarter features on the subscription model," Yang explained. This is where premium features and add-on services come in.
Right now, the business structure is still B2B2C. Tuya sells to device providers, who then sell to consumers. But the company maintains insight into consumer behavior to build better use cases, which helps those device builders figure out what to make next.
The AI Device Boom
Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, Yang sees a turning point coming. When asked about whether demand for AI devices is real or just hype, he positioned 2025 as "the essential year, or initial year for the AI device."
"We really are seeing that through our offering, we're already starting to convince more and more developers to start trying out AI," he said. But there's an educational component that needs to happen first. Developers need to understand what's possible on the technology side and combine that with insights about what end users actually want.
Yang's prediction? "As you can see, 2026 will be the booming or starting year for AI devices."
That would make Hey Tuya's launch particularly well-timed. If Yang is right, Tuya is positioning itself to ride a wave of AI device adoption with a consumer product that can tie together nearly a billion already-deployed smart devices. Not a bad starting position for a company's first consumer offering.
The question is whether consumers are ready for another AI assistant in their lives, and whether Tuya's deep hardware connections will translate into an actually useful consumer experience. We'll find out later this year when Hey Tuya moves from testing to a full market launch.
