Meet Hoot: The Owl That Lives in Your Home Folder
Dwelco's new AI assistant doesn't just answer questions — it diagnoses problems from photos, runs the repair-vs-replace math, finds a local pro, surfaces the right how-to video, and puts a 911 shortcut one tap away when you describe a hazard.
It's 11pm on a Tuesday. Your dishwasher is half-full of dirty plates and a digital display you can't decode. You Google "Bosch error E7" and get 14 forum threads, two YouTube videos in languages you don't speak, and one Reddit comment from 2018 that says "mine did this for like a week and then stopped."
You weigh: pay a repair guy $200 to come look at it? Buy a new one? Run it on the cycle that doesn't seem to trigger the error? You go to bed undecided.
This is the problem with home maintenance. By the time you have a question, the answer needs to come with a phone number, a video, a part, or a decision — not a paragraph.
For the last six weeks, Dwelco's AI assistant has been quietly growing up. It started as a text chat that could look up your warranties. It is now a full home concierge — and it has a name.
Meet Hoot
An owl, because owls watch the house at night. Hoot is the friendly face of Dwelco AI — built with safety baked in, including a one-tap shortcut to 911 from your phone when you describe a hazard.
Hoot lives in your home folder. Tap the avatar from any screen and you're in conversation. No menus. No "How can I help you today?" wall. Hoot already knows your home — every appliance you've added, every warranty that's still active, every maintenance task that's overdue, every recall from CPSC and NHTSA that touches something you own.
That context is the difference between "your dishwasher" and "your 6-year-old Bosch 800 Series, out of warranty since April, last serviced in January, with a known E7 drain-pump pattern."
Hoot also knows what to do about it. Diagnose a photo. Run the repair-vs-replace math. Find a plumber. Watch the right video. Surface a 911 shortcut when you describe a hazard. One assistant. Every room of the house.
Diagnose from a photo
Most home problems can't be described in words. A stained ceiling, a leaking valve, a flashing error display, a hairline crack in the fridge gasket — these are things you see, not things you type. So Hoot looks.
Tap the camera, attach a photo, and Hoot reads what's in the frame. Water damage. Mold. A burst valve. A loose belt. A flame sensor coated in carbon. The model behind Hoot (powered by Gemini 2.5 Pro) can read error codes off LCD displays, identify model numbers from data plates, and tell the difference between cosmetic wear and structural concern.
But the diagnosis is only the first step. Every photo-driven reply ships with up to four action cards — the things you'd want to do next, ready to tap.
You didn't ask a chatbot. You asked a maintenance expert who's already met every appliance in your house.
A note on photo diagnostics: Hoot's visual reads are informational and not a substitute for a licensed inspector. For health-adjacent hazards — mold, lead paint, asbestos, carbon monoxide, contaminated water — confirm with a qualified professional before acting. For structural damage, electrical hazards, or anything you can't safely access, call a pro before doing anything yourself.
Repair or replace?
The single most expensive question in home ownership is "should I fix this, or buy a new one?" Get it wrong on a $1,200 HVAC repair when the unit is three years from end-of-life, and you've thrown away the cost of a new system.
Hoot has an opinion. Ask any item-level repair question and Hoot pulls three numbers in parallel: the expected repair cost for the symptom you're describing, the current depreciated value of the appliance (category-aware — fridges depreciate differently from furnaces), and the warranty status (active, expired, or repair-covered).
That math becomes a recommendation in plain English. Then the cards: a pro repair link, the part on Amazon for a DIY swap, the YouTube tutorial.
What Hoot doesn't do: pretend the answer is always one way. Old appliances out of warranty? Sometimes repair, sometimes replace — depends on the depreciation curve and your plans. Hoot will tell you why, and let you decide.
Find the right pro, fast
When the answer is "call someone," Hoot makes the next 30 seconds dead simple.
The pro-repair card surfaces two providers in parallel — Yelp and Google Maps. Both queries are pre-filled with your appliance brand, your ZIP code, and the symptom you described. So instead of typing "plumber near me" into Google and scrolling through five SEO-optimized aggregator sites, you tap a chip and the first result is a licensed Bosch tech 4 minutes away.
The brand matters. A generic "appliance repair" search puts you in front of generalists who fix whatever rolls through their shop. A "Bosch dishwasher repair" search puts you in front of techs who have the right part on the truck.
Watch, don't read
For everything that doesn't require a pro, there's almost always a video.
Ask a procedural question — "how do I clean my dryer vent," "where's the reset button on a Whirlpool fridge," "how do I bleed a radiator" — and Hoot returns a rich card pulled from the YouTube Data API: the actual thumbnail, the channel name, the duration, the view count.
On desktop, tapping the card opens an in-app sheet so you can watch without leaving Dwelco. On mobile, it opens the YouTube app directly — because iOS YouTube embeds have never quite worked right, and we'd rather give you the native player. If the API doesn't return anything good, Hoot falls back to a simple search card with the right keywords pre-filled.
Either way, you get a video — not a paragraph telling you to "consult your owner's manual."
One assistant. Every room.
Hoot follows you around the app. But Hoot also knows when to get out of the way.
On the dashboard, Hoot greets you by name and offers a one-tap home health briefing — overdue tasks, active recalls, warranties about to expire. Tap the FAB and you're in a conversation that already understands your home.
On the inventory grid where you're just browsing, Hoot collapses to a small floating tap target. Your appliances are the star; Hoot waits in the corner. In the Add Item form where you're scanning a barcode, Hoot disappears entirely.
The most useful trick: tap Hoot from an item detail page — your fridge, your dishwasher, your furnace — and Hoot pins that item to the conversation. A removable chip appears above the input with the brand, age, and warranty status. Every question is now scoped to that item. "How often should I clean the filter?" means this dishwasher. No need to keep typing "my Bosch."
Tap the ✕ on the chip and you're back to whole-home Hoot. One assistant. Three contexts. Adaptive presence.
An emergency shortcut
This section is hard to write, because we hope you never use it.
Hoot listens for life-safety language. Gas. Smoke. Fire. Carbon monoxide. Burst pipe. Electrical sparks. Appliance fire. When you describe one of these — "I smell gas in my kitchen," "smoke is coming from the back of the dryer," "there's a popping noise from the breaker box" — Hoot replaces the entire chat with a single red shortcut card that opens your phone's dialer pre-loaded with 911.
No menus. No follow-up questions. No "let me search for that." No daily rate limit. One tap hands you off to your phone's native dialer, pre-loaded with 911.
The text on the card is short, because seconds matter. The instructions in the bubble above it are shorter: Evacuate. Don't flip switches. Call from outside. Hoot defers to the dispatcher for everything else.
We tuned the trigger conservatively. Hoot only enters emergency mode on language that explicitly describes a hazard happening now — not a hypothetical ("what should I do if I smelled gas") or a past-tense recap. Even then, the card never auto-dials. The user always confirms.
Important: Hoot's emergency shortcut is a convenience for getting to your phone's dialer faster — not a substitute for calling 911 yourself the moment you recognize a hazard. The shortcut places a standard call through your phone's dialer and is subject to your carrier's coverage and local 911 routing. If you suspect a life-safety emergency, don't wait on Hoot's detection — call 911 directly. US 911 only at launch; international support is on the roadmap.
Buy the part, not the appliance
For everything else, there's a part you can replace yourself in 15 minutes.
A clogged drain. A worn gasket. A burnt-out bulb. A cracked belt. A spent furnace filter. Ask Hoot and the DIY-part card shows up — pre-filled with your appliance brand, your model, the exact part type, and the dimensions if relevant. Tap once and you're on Amazon looking at the right SKU.
Hoot won't recommend a part swap when a pro is the right call. The model decides — and if it's wrong, the action card gets demoted to an "info" card instead. We tune this aggressively.
Disclosure: Amazon product links from Hoot's DIY-part cards are affiliate-tagged. We may earn a small commission when you buy through them — at no extra cost to you. This is not a paid endorsement; Hoot's part recommendations are generated by the model from your appliance's brand and model, not by an advertiser.
What's next
Today Hoot has nine action cards in its toolkit, organized in a small registry: pro repair, DIY part, how-to video, warranty claim, insurance claim, add-to-inventory, reshoot, follow-up info, and the 911 shortcut card. Each one is independently testable. Adding new ones is genuinely easy — the framework was built in 9 spike PRs over six weeks, and we're keeping the cadence.
Next on the roadmap:
📜 Receipts
Hoot already reads them. Soon Hoot tracks them, links them to items, and surfaces them at tax season and during insurance claims.
📖 Manuals
Every PDF you've ever lost, vectored and ready to answer specific questions about your model — not a generic search result.
📅 Booking
Tap a pro-repair card and book the appointment without leaving Dwelco. The next-step button becomes the next-step itself.
🛡 Claims v2
Today's insurance card opens a stub. Soon it assembles a full claim — photos, receipts, repair history, warranty — and submits it.
The pattern: every "I need to do a thing in my house" turns into a single tap.
Open Hoot in your home folder.
Hoot is live today. Free forever. No upgrade, no waitlist, no summer launch date.
Go say hi.