CNET selects ST as hub of choice for massive HA project

Yah… I considered this an unsatisfactory explanation because…

  1. Basing the entire Smart Home industry evaluation around Amazon Echo is a ludicrous premise. Perhaps Amazon bought CNET the house??

  2. Was “universal accessibility” actually “promised”? Where’s the citation? CNET is setting up their own strawman to burn.

  3. The failure of SHM is indisputable. That is a feature that they could have called out specifically; especially because it currently integrates with monitoring provided by Scout, only one of very few other vendors featured in the article.

I don’t think so. It’s indisputable that voice control has become the preferred way of interacting with smart things simply because it’s the most natural way of communication for humans. Not pushing buttons, flipping switches or making weird gestures. Just speaking. This is evident from the amount of investment the Big Four (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon) put into voice recognition technology. Echo is just happen to be the most affordable and versatile device on the market today that makes this technology available to everyone.

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Yah… It certainly is the case in my household. Perhaps not such a ludicrous choice of angle / focus for the CNET series after all.

It just skews everything away from the automation paradigm… What we traditionally think of “smart”. Understanding & responding verbally is quite smart, but a small part of the industry vision. :thinking:

Maybe ST will get serious once CNET starts dinging them for the poor reliability, stability.

CNET could only ding them if they actually had any interest in the automation part of HA, in which case the review would end up mixed. (+ for community and development freedom, - for scheduler issues)
The fact they’ve switched over to ECHO as being their interface of choice, merely points to their lack of evolution, they haven’t progressed past the remote control implementation phase.

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yeah, that’s what I gleaned from the article. I’m all for improvements to the app UI, but if things are reliable then you should hardly ever have to use the app, so no big deal. I always thought this “test” was kind of phony. Do they actually have people living in this house full time? If so, are these people actually interested in home automation?

Sounds like their use case is similar to my neighbor. Our houses came with a z-wave lock and thermostat. He wanted to control them from his phone from anywhere. Since that’s all he wanted to do, I recommended SmartThings to him. He’s been thrilled with it! Even went and bought a wall wart for a lamp and the Linear garage door opener. But as soon as I start asking if he has setup anything to happen automatically, he just glazes over.

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to be fair, humans, or maybe the current generation, or maybe just our generation, wasn’t brought up thinking of ways to automate things in the home.
remote control, sure we all get that, it’s easy to substitute one manual control schema for another one.
Home automation requires a deeper and different level of thinking and analysis, that I for one took some time to wrap my head around…
I have no shortage of automation ideas now, three years after I started with ST, but in the beginning?, I was like what???

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I agree, CNET did not attack this from the goal of HA. They seem to be going after remote control.

Also, I was incredibly disappointed in the articles themselves. With the equipment that they said was purchased, I expected a much more detailed and in depth article to follow.

It really came across as a half hearted effort as a filler story.

Unfortunately, I gave up on CNET a long time ago because they just seem like a tech tabloid rag.

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Oh please, speech recognition is not intelligent enough for you? I guess all the sci-fi writers from Space Odyssey to Start Trek got it wrong then. :slight_smile:

Most “automations” are pretty dumb. Turn on the light when someone enters the bathroom? Sure. Turn them off when there’s no motion for 10 minutes? No problem. This has been done 20 years ago. But can your “automation” guess what color and brightness of light or what kind of music and its volume a human being wants at any particular moment? I don’t think so. Voice control is the essence of the smart home. Cnet nailed this one alright.

As someone who relies heavily on voice control (I’m quadriparetic with limited hand function), I read this completely differently–that handsfree voice control is now a minimum requirement for mass market home automation. And Echo is the best choice for that right now.

It doesn’t mean voice will be the only form of device control. I use schedules, motion sensors, Ibeacons, etc. But I want voice integration with everything, because that’s my Plan B.

If CNET hadn’t made Echo integration a minimum requirement, I’d have thought they were behind the times. Just sayin’… :wink:

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Absolutely. But it’s become a center of gravity for home automation. This is the killer feature that will eventually make home automation ubiquitous for anyone, even for the most “technologically challenged” ones. My 6-years-old is not impressed by all the automations I put around the house, but he’s fascinated by Alexa. :slight_smile:

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I agree about all of your points about the voice control being a minimum requirement, it really is essential.

My point about the entire things, I guess, is this;

They created this entire thing to talk about home automation, but they only concerned themselves with home “Control”.

While home automation and home control are quickly becoming synonymous, many of us still recognize the vast differences.

Yes, programming the lights to come on with mutton and go off ten minutes later is nothing new. I do not need a smart device to do this. Lutron makes an incredible switch that does this.

But, and here’s where I was expecting this article series to go, deep into the “smart home”.

The ultimate combination of automation, control, and knowledge. And yes, @JDRoberts, the voice control via Alexa is the key to this.

I want a home that turns my lights on and off as I walk in and leave, or when the ambient light decreases, or whatever. I want it to also it to remind me to close the windows because it’s raining outside. And, here’s the real hard part, I want it to do things based on the person or persons that are in the room at the time.

Such as, adjust the temp down if everyone is home and all of the common since lights are on and there is a lot of motion. This would be the house recognizing an active space that is warming up.

This is really nothing more than complex programming, an emulation of A.I.

This is my goal in my home. And with enough hardware and the correct logic I will have it.

My disappointing came in the total lack of in depth tech in an in depth tech article.

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Truthfully, CNET failed this one miserably. Alexa is awesome but it only complements the HA. It cannot be the ‘central piece’, especially not for managing lights. Sure it’s futuristic and cool, but relying on voice control to turn on your hallway lights when you walk in, is the dumbest idea that CNET obviously didn’t think it through. Asking Alaxa to turn the hallway light on, when you just arrived home, means sitting next to a light switch and yelling at a speaker, only to be served with “I found several devices matching that name in your profile”…

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RELIABILITY RELIABILITY RELIABILITY WHERE ART THOU. IT IS NOT A FEATURE, IT IS MANDATORY. Ok, I’ll try and calm down now but sirens going off waking up my family on a peaceful Sunday morning is not acceptable. I even double checked the smartthings app status before opening a door because I know there are active issues. If Sammy doesn’t get their $h1t together soon they may as well just have flushed the 200 million. Eor.

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