Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I bought six of the Nucleus intercoms, one for each bedroom, one for the kitchen and one for the home office. I am planning on sending one to each set of grandparents when they are back in stock. I got the Nucleus intercoms partly because they looked like a really cool gadget and partly because they solved a problem with my current house. My house does not have a built-in intercom system, even though it is wired for whole-house audio and CAT5. I had a Nutone system in a previous house, but adding it to this house would have meant running new wiring. There is no easy way to get wiring to the second floor, where most of the bedrooms are located. I've also had a commercial telephone system with intercom (a Panasonic TDA50) in a previous house, but that would be fairly expensive and my wife hated it. That left RF-based wireless intercoms as the only option, but these haven't worked well for me in the past. The Nucleus intercom solves my problem by offering connectivity through both WiFi and wired networking. Installation was pretty easy. I swapped out the wall mounts for the stands, because I haven't figured out the placement yet. The software configuration was straightforward. After choosing the WiFi network, which was a little sluggish, you're given the option of creating a Nucleus account or adding a new intercom to your home. You need to create a Nucleus account with your first intercom. You'll then receive a Home Code by email that you can use to add subsequent intercoms easily. (You will need to approve the addition of each intercom by clicking on a link in an email message that is sent to you as part of the setup.) One of the intercoms got wedged during the picture taking process, but power-cycling the device fixed that. They currently don't allow you to bypass the picture-taking process during the initial setup. But, you can easily change the picture later. Installation on my mobile phone was easy. There's an option to send an email message with instructions to your phone (no texting option, unfortunately), but it gets wedged if you use the same email address used to create the Nucleus account. You actually don't need this email message. Just download the App from the Apple or Android App stores and use the Nucleus account and Home Code to add it to your intercom network. The video on the Nucleus is a little dark because the rooms in my house have room lighting on the ceiling in the center of the room, so your face is backlit when you use the intercom. Turning on a lamp near the intercom seems to fix this. Alexa is a nice bonus. We already have an Amazon Echo and two Echo Dots, but the Nucleus gives us Alexa throughout the house. There are a bunch of minor issues, such as the inability to page a group of rooms (e.g., to tell the kids to come downstairs for dinner) and the inability to schedule the Do Not Disturb mode during sleeptime. But, I expect the software will improve over time, just like Alexa. My kids like the Nucleus a lot.