If you opened the Tuya app after a recent update and found it calling itself an AI life assistant, you are not imagining it. The store listings now lead with an assistant called Hey Tuya, and the app carries new in-app subscriptions alongside the device controls you were using before.
This article covers what Hey Tuya means for privacy and for local control. It is research synthesis from store listings, Tuya’s own announcements and financial results, and one policy page. This site has not run the app or tested Hey Tuya, so nothing below is a hands-on observation. Where the sources are silent, the article says so.
What changed in the Tuya app
The US App Store listing showed the title “Tuya: Smart Life, Smart Living” when it was read on 2026-10-07, with version 7.12.0 as the current build. Search snapshots of the same listing also show it as “Tuya — Your AI Assistant for Living”. The listing describes Hey Tuya as an assistant for conversational device control, safety-event analysis and energy tracking. It also lists lifestyle tasks such as meal planning, fitness, meeting notes, translation and visual recognition.
The Chinese-region listing for the same product, 涂鸦 (Tuya), describes an assistant named 你好涂鸦 (Hello Tuya), which is the Chinese name for Hey Tuya. It lists the same feature families and says the app supports 66 languages with AI translation. Chinese-language searches for this article found no forum discussion of the change, so the Chinese-side evidence is store and corporate material, not community sentiment.
Smart Life (智能生活) is Tuya’s white-label app, used by many third-party device brands. As our explainer on running Tuya and Smart Life together covers, it runs on the same Tuya backend as the Tuya app but keeps separate accounts and devices. The Smart Life store page could not be fetched, so whether it carries Hey Tuya is unconfirmed. Do not assume the Tuya app’s behavior applies to Smart Life.
Why it changed
The commercial reason is in Tuya’s own reporting. Its first-quarter 2026 results, released 2026-05-11, renamed the revenue line previously called “SaaS and others” to “AI Application & others”. Tuya said the change reflects a strategy of building AI into every software product in that line, with a focus on subscription value-added services built on large AI models. Chinese financial coverage of the results reported the same rename.
That reframes the new health, diet and calendar features. They look less like extras bolted onto a device controller and more like the product the company intends to charge for.
Hey Tuya was announced from Hangzhou on 2025-12-25 and made its overseas debut at CES 2026 in January. Tuya describes it as a multi-agent assistant that combines cloud and edge processing, with a long-term memory engine for user habits and preferences. It was described as in global public testing at the time.
What the app now declares it collects
Search-result summaries of the US listing show its privacy label declaring Health & Fitness, Location, Contact Info, User Content, Identifiers, Usage Data and Diagnostics as data linked to you. At the data-type level that covers items such as health and fitness data, precise and approximate location, email, phone number, photos and videos, user ID and crash data. The same summaries list Usage Data under “Data Used to Track You”, Apple’s label for data used to track you across other companies’ apps and websites.
These categories come from page and search summaries rather than the raw listing, so treat them as “the listing declares” and check the live page under App Privacy. Labels are self-reported by the developer and set per app, not per feature. A health-data entry tells you the app can handle that data, not that Hey Tuya is the thing collecting it.
In-app purchases on the US listing include cloud video storage plans, an AI protection plan billed weekly, and an annual Hey Tuya subscription. Prices are store-region-specific and change, so check your own store page.
One narrower data point. A Tuya Chinese-language support page, seen only as a search snippet, says the app’s location-change automation trigger uses background location and does not upload that location to the cloud or use it for ads. That is an unverified vendor claim about one automation feature, not about the assistant.
What Tuya has and has not said about privacy
The CES announcement states no privacy guarantees. It does not say whether Hey Tuya itself runs locally. Local processing is mentioned only for a separate AI Box product.
Tuya’s 2026-04-23 Global Developer Summit announcement says the upgraded Hey Tuya integrates with third-party services such as Google Mail, Calendar and Docs. It also says hardware compatibility expands to Matter and open-source platforms including Home Assistant. It gives no data-handling or local-versus-cloud detail. That Home Assistant mention is easy to read as local control, but the release does not say how the compatibility works, so treat it as unexplained.
The privacy policy is the awkward part. The Tuya policy text this research could read at auth.tuya.com shows an effective date of 2024-08-29. It does not mention AI features, voice assistants, large language models or third-party AI model providers, and it does not address health data. A third-party policy tracker lists a newer version dated 2026-09-29. Its summary found no AI or health-data language, but the tracker’s reliability is unconfirmed and the 2026-09-29 text itself was not read.
So the narrow claim is that the policy text we could read predates the assistant and does not mention it, not that the current policy is silent on AI. The Tuya app may also be governed by a different document. The in-app policy is the one that counts.
Does any of this touch local control?
Short answer, as far as any source shows, no. But that is an inference, not a Tuya statement.
LocalTuya and tuya-local talk to a Wi-Fi device over your LAN using its local key. They do not go through the app. Our guides on getting a Tuya local key and choosing between LocalTuya and tuya-local cover that path. Tuya Zigbee devices paired to Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA need no local key at all and never go through the app. From that architecture, the app’s AI layer sits beside local control rather than in its path. No Tuya source states this, so treat it as this site’s reading of how the pieces fit.
No source found for this article suggests device firmware or LAN-protocol behavior changes because of the app pivot, and this article is not implying it. If you already run devices locally, the sensible reading is “nothing announced affects you,” not “nothing can.”
Practical steps for a privacy-minded owner
None of these claim to switch off the AI features. They are ways to limit exposure while the unknowns stay unknown.
- Read the in-app privacy policy and permission screens before granting anything. Check location, photos and any health or fitness prompts individually, and see whether the app still works with them denied.
- Use the app to pair Wi-Fi devices and get the local key, then stop opening it day to day. Our tinytuya guide shows a local route that skips Home Assistant too.
- Consider blocking the devices from the internet after pairing, in the order our guide to blocking Tuya devices sets out. That limits what the devices send, not what the phone app sends.
- If you run two accounts or a mix of apps, read the Tuya and Smart Life accounts explainer and why eWeLink and Smart Life come from different companies first, since the branding overlap is easy to get wrong.
Blocking a device from the internet does nothing about the phone app. The app’s collection runs over your phone’s connection, not the device’s. Also pair the device, extract its local key and confirm local control works before you apply the block. A device blocked before its first cloud session never hands over a key.
The honest framing for a local-first owner is that the app is turning into a product you are the customer of, while the devices stay roughly what they were. Keeping those two apart is the whole strategy. For the wider jurisdiction question, see does Tuya send your data to China.
What we could not verify
The sources left these open.
- Whether Hey Tuya conversations, photos or health inputs are processed in the cloud, by which model providers, and for how long they are retained.
- Whether declining the AI features stops the associated data collection, or whether permissions are requested at install regardless.
- Whether the Smart Life app carries Hey Tuya.
- Whether the 2026-09-29 policy version mentions AI, and which policy document governs the Tuya app.
- Whether any firmware or LAN-protocol behavior changes because of the app pivot.
- What Tuya’s Home Assistant compatibility for Hey Tuya actually does.
FAQ
Is Hey Tuya a separate app, or part of the Tuya app I already have?
Part of the Tuya app, per the store listings (version 7.12.0). Whether Smart Life carries it is unconfirmed.
Does Hey Tuya send my smart home data to the cloud?
Tuya describes it as combining cloud and edge processing. No source found for this article says what is processed where, so it cannot be answered beyond that.
Do I need a subscription to keep controlling my Tuya devices?
The listings show subscriptions for cloud video storage, an AI protection plan and Hey Tuya itself. Nothing found says basic device control is moving behind a paywall. Local control through LocalTuya or tuya-local does not use the app, so these plans are not part of that path.
Will the Tuya app’s AI features affect LocalTuya or tuya-local?
Nothing announced says so. This site’s reading of the architecture is that they do not, though that is inference.
Why does the Tuya app ask for health, fitness and location data?
The privacy label declares those categories, and the assistant’s features include fitness, diet and calendar tasks. Labels are per app, so the label alone cannot tie a permission to a feature.
Can I use Tuya devices without ever opening the app after setup?
With local control configured, yes in practice, since LocalTuya and tuya-local reach the device over the LAN. The app is still how you pair Wi-Fi devices and get the key. Tuya Zigbee devices paired to Zigbee2MQTT or ZHA skip the app entirely.