It turns out they weren't kidding when they said the cloud was going to be everywhere. Its latest home is the Das Keyboard 5Q, self-proclaimed as the first computer keyboard that is cloud-enabled.
Some logical next questions are bound to follow. Namely, what is a cloud-enabled keyboard, and why would you want such a thing? Both of those are a little tricky to answer.
First up, a cloud-enabled keyboard is really just shorthand for a keyboard that supports IFTTT. For those unfamiliar, IFTTT stands for If This Then That, and it's a free, web-based service that lets you tie various devices and services together with a rudimentary scripting language. Want your Philips Hue lights to blink red when someone appears in front of your Ring doorbell system? IFTTT can tie them together. (The 5Q also works with a similar service for web apps, Zapier.) What Das has done is bring the keyboard into that ecosystem, so if someone's at the door, you can have the D key blink red.
Sounds neat, but in testing the Das Keyboard 5Q, it quickly became apparent that keys blinking or changing color is rarely the most effective way to be alerted to something—especially something urgent, since a blinking key is easy to miss. Das offers a number of pre-built recipes to try, but few of them are very useful, such as notifying your keyboard when a Twitch stream you follow begins, or alerting you via keyboard "when your BMW is arriving soon."
This concept made better sense with another recipe I created, connecting Notion sensors on my garage doors to set a color on my keyboard's number keys: Green for "garage door closed," red for "garage door opened." Now this was handy: At a glance I could always tell whether someone had left a garage door open. Of course, all of this only works as well as your smart home gear. I tried the same trick for the door of my Samsung refrigerator, and it never worked at all, nor did an ostensibly handy recipe that was supposed to urge me to stand up and stretch every hour by flashing the Escape key. That's more troubling, since that should only have to rely on the clock, not another device. Whatever you set up, though, note that configuring all of this within IFTTT can be a quite lengthy process that I imagine will try the patience of anyone who's not an expert with the web service.
Just before launching the product, Das Keyboard added another feature called Command Center to the mix. This feature is designed to let you use a key shortcut on the keyboard to control your smart home gear directly—press a certain button combination to turn the lights on, for example.