• Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Special Offers
Business Intelligence Info
  • Business Intelligence
    • BI News and Info
    • Big Data
    • Mobile and Cloud
    • Self-Service BI
  • CRM
    • CRM News and Info
    • InfusionSoft
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
    • NetSuite
    • OnContact
    • Salesforce
    • Workbooks
  • Data Mining
    • Pentaho
    • Sisense
    • Tableau
    • TIBCO Spotfire
  • Data Warehousing
    • DWH News and Info
    • IBM DB2
    • Microsoft SQL Server
    • Oracle
    • Teradata
  • Predictive Analytics
    • FICO
    • KNIME
    • Mathematica
    • Matlab
    • Minitab
    • RapidMiner
    • Revolution
    • SAP
    • SAS/SPSS
  • Humor

ProBeat: A smart speaker does not a smart home make

January 11, 2020   Big Data
 ProBeat: A smart speaker does not a smart home make

To coincide with CES 2020 this week, Strategy Analytics released a survey claiming that smart homes had passed “the tipping point” and that “Most Homes Are Now Smart Homes.” Putting aside that U.S. homes don’t represent the world’s homes, the survey assumed that you had a smart home if you “own at least one smart home device.” First, owning doesn’t mean actively using. Second, a smart home is not defined by owning “smart speakers, interactive security systems, and smart thermostats.” Third, that begs the question: How should we define a smart home?

The smart home definition is important for a few reasons. Technology has been flooding into our homes, and CES 2020 showed this trend is not abating. Internet of things (IoT) devices are not going away, and neither is the dream of a smart home. That doesn’t mean all home devices marketed as “smart” are inherently useful, however, let alone make our homes “smart.” Additionally, there are plenty of valid privacy and security concerns in a potential smart home.

So, let’s try to make sense of all these devices.

IoT, AI, and smart

First and foremost, an IoT device is not a smart device. If your lightbulb, your thermostat, or your fridge is connected to the internet, that doesn’t mean you suddenly have a smart home. Think of it this way: If all you can do with your fancy new light bulb is turn it on and off from your phone, rather than a light switch, that’s not smart. Thermostats are a better example. If you can lower the temperature of your home after you’ve already left for vacation, that’s not smart. That’s an IoT device, and it’s neat, but it’s not smart. If, however, your thermostat can save your home energy and you money by making adjustments based on weather forecasting, occupancy patterns, humidity, and electricity costs, that’s smart.

Next — and this is what really caught my eye in this survey — a smart speaker doesn’t make a smart home. Your smart speaker needs to be doing more for your home than a virtual assistant can do from your phone. If you’re merely asking Alexa for the weather, or Google Assistant to play some music, that’s not much of a smart home.

(Speaking of, Google had a much more muted presence at CES this year. At CES 2019, the company built a freaking massive, rhyming, catchy, musical of a ride for its Google Assistant announcements. At CES 2020, the company dropped its Google Assistant news the old-fashioned way. What can you expect from Google Assistant this year? Among other things, you guessed it: deeper smart home integration.)

I would further argue that artificial intelligence alone is not a good measure of whether a device is contributing to a smart home. What matters is what the AI is enabling.

Pushing the limits of what’s possible

If your smart speaker is controlling your alarm, lights, blinds, fridge, and toaster, we’re getting somewhere. But there’s a difference between you telling your smart speaker to set an alarm, which you can do yourself with an alarm clock, and having it automatically turn off the alarm when you’ve gotten out of bed — something your alarm clock can’t do. If your Google Assistant can lower your blinds automatically when the sun goes down and raise them when your alarm goes off, that’s the inklings of a smart home.

Put another way, AI has to be doing something in the home that wasn’t possible before, or at least not reasonably possible. Sure, I could rig my blinds to move at certain times of the day and set complicated schedules on my thermostat, but neither is optimal.

A smart home contains devices that understand your home, its surroundings, and its inhabitants. And they actively make the home smarter. To be fair, that’s much harder to formulate a survey around.

One final note on the privacy and security front: I suspect that we may one day see smart home devices that are not connected to the internet. First we got IoT devices for the home. Now we’re starting to see smart IoT devices for the home. One day we will get smart devices for the home with built-in offline machine learning models. They will do their processing on-device without requiring a constant connection to the cloud. And that will be the real tipping point.

ProBeat is a column in which Emil rants about whatever crosses him that week.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Home, ProBeat, Smart, Speaker
  • Recent Posts

    • The Easier Way For Banks To Handle Data Security While Working Remotely
    • 3 Ways Data Virtualization is Evolving to Meet Market Demands
    • Did you find everything you need today?
    • Missing Form Editor through command bar in Microsoft Dynamics 365
    • I’m So Excited
  • Categories

  • Archives

    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
© 2021 Business Intelligence Info
Power BI Training | G Com Solutions Limited