Promise of A smart home is a fine-grained control of the environment that can automatically adjust to meet our needs. From gently waking us in the morning to helping us fall asleep at night, it works tirelessly to keep us comfortable. Gadgets free us from domestic drudgery, remind us of work commitments and appointments, and protect us from intruders. A smart home should make life easier.
But reality is far from that vision. “Dad! The lights are off!” “Simon! Google won’t open the curtains anymore!” “How to get YouTube online Your television? ” “Which app is Garden Lights?” “Invite smart light bulbs, robot vacuums, smart speakers, and other fantastic devices into your house, and you’ll see cracks in no time.
When things are working well, you get a glimpse of comfort and convenience. But when problems pop up—and they often do—the solution falls on us. If you’ve ever wasted a morning trying to set up a security camera; sacrificed an afternoon connecting your light board to your new Wi-Fi mesh system; or ripped your hair out on a robot vacuum that worked so well yesterday , but now useless circles, then you know my pain.
single ring circus
Control caused the most problems in my family. Take smart lighting as an example. In order for it to work, you have to remind everyone in your home to leave the old switch alone. Fail, and your elaborate remotes, voice commands, and schedule are gone. smart switch Can help, but they can also just add to the confusion. Even if you’ve instructed everyone in your home, a visitor naively flicking that switch will render your smart light bulb useless again.
Then there are applications. So many apps. Each device has its own app. The more smart home gadgets you add, the more cluttered your phone becomes. Tracking which app controls which device is tricky enough. But you also have to install them and train everyone else, or accept your role as the gatekeeper of the home setup.
However, you can always ask Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri. correct? Well, actually, the security camera works with Google, but you have to use Siri as the doorbell. Google Assistant plays music on speakers in the dining room, while Alexa plays music in your bedroom. Oh, and when you ask, you can’t say, “Turn on the lights in my bedroom.” You have to say, “Turn on the lights in Amy’s bedroom.”
Even if everything is fine, it may take a few seconds for your chosen assistant to turn off the lights. Telling my wife not to touch the switch or close the curtains when I repeat a voice command or tap the phone screen is kind of ridiculous to me. “Is it more convenient?” she asked, confused.
I can hardly get it straight. No wonder everyone else in my family is struggling. Sometimes I feel like I’m asking Hal to open the pod door. As the Google Assistant kept telling me, “Something went wrong.”
brighter future
Fortunately, there is a silver lining on the horizon. A new smart home standard, Matter, is on the way, and it will solve some of these problems. It’ll simplify setup, enable you to use whatever smart assistant you like, and improve latency so the device responds faster to commands.
But don’t get too excited. As Michelle Turner, head of the smart home ecosystem at Google, told me recently, it will provide a strong and reliable foundation, but the individual devices themselves will still require a lot of work.
