Alexa doesn’t talk to the devices directly in most cases.
If you have a Z wave motion sensor and a Z wave switch, and no hub, there’s nothing Alexa can do to make them work together. For that matter, Alexa won’t be able to turn on the switch either.
It’s a great UI. But it can’t establish a home automation network for protocols that require a central controller.
By definition, automation means the execution of tasks with a minimum of human involvement. Verbally telling your Echo to turn on a light is no more automation than would be you flipping a physical switch to do so. Voice control is more convenient…even cooler. But it’s not automation. That same light turning on at sunset as the result of a ST lighting rule? That’s automation.
Oh, c’mon now. Any AI system capable of natural language processing can surely handle schedules, automation rules and more complex patterns. It’s merely a matter of the product feature set definition. There’s no technological barriers.
Like I said, it’s a temporary hurdle. 15 years ago there were 6 competing cell phone standards. If Apple, Google and Amazon want to make money in the smart home market they will have to force a single communication standard on the industry. There’s no way around it.
Phone manufacturers and mobile phone companies make plenty of profits without having to force a single standard on the industry. I don’t see any reason why home automation needs to be different. JMO. 
What did I say that wasn’t completely true?
Your question was, “What is automation?” (which you then followed with your own quite inaccurate answer for) with regard to what Echo and Alexa are, not what they could be if Amazon decided to give them additional capabilities that they do not currently have. But the same is true of just about any software system. The fact that Alexa is an advanced natural language AI is irrelevant. It is not an automation sytem. ST, Wink, Hue et al have none of Alexa’s AI capabilities, and yet they are HA systems.
Apple collaborating with others and following through on a standard?
LMAO Yea, right!
Interesting perspective. I do think something is a foot with the approaches App, Goog, and Amazon have taken though. And this could be indeed part of it.
However, theories or plans do not make it reality. For now, there isn’t automation nor a unifying communication methodology.
Automation and rule engines are relatively simple, as you alluded to. Be interesting to see what comes of the communication part. That’s certainly further off, because even if announced tomorrow you need many people making devices for that standard to get folks to migrate.
Exactly. If it were up to them we’d never had a single standard. It’s companies like Google and Apple whose business is to cell their services to billions of customers across the globe who wanted to break these artificial barriers.
You got it. Incompatibility of Smart Home gadgets was named as the single major obstacle to wide adoption of Smart Home technology. Therefore I have reasons to believe that unification is inevitable, but we’re probably still few years away from it. There were several attempts to solidify the landscape in recent years. All of them ultimately failed. The thing is, that no major consumer electronics player in their right mind (except Samsung perhaps) is going to tolerate the status quo. Simply because it’s detrimental to their business.
Echo does not DO anything, it is a voice interface with limited local processing. I believe the only local processing is a timer function. As I said, it is an interface, not a controller. All of the automation is done via one of the hubs. In my case either the HUE or the SmartThings hub. (with some cloud processing).
(In fact, somewhere around here I have a copy of the Echo source code…)
In case of SmartThings, Wink and Lowe’s Iris, which together dominate DIY home automation market all automation is done in the cloud. The hub is nothing more than a bridge that connects cloud intelligence with the “physical graph”. It’s only needed because there’s currently no standard connectivity protocol. Give it a few years. Remember, it took more than a decade for the Internet to become the dominant global standard. Before that there was a patchwork of incompatible proprietary networking protocols. Smart Home is no different, it’s just a matter of time.
It’s still a local network
A) both SmartThings and wink offer some local processing. It’s not a lot but it is there.
B) more importantly, all three of these hubs contain physical devices which act as controllers to establish a network with the local Z wave and zigbee end devices like sensors and light switches. These controllers are certified by third-party organizations. A lot of the reliability issues that SmartThings has run into comes from trying to synchronize the cloud with the local activity. But there’s a lot of local activity. It’s not the cloud that decides how a message gets from the bedroom to the living room.
HomeKit runs locally except for the voice recognition piece and out of building control. And both SmartThings in wink have added more local operations in the last year. So it’s not that everything is running towards a single cloud-based standard.
No question, all three of the hubs that you mentioned work with the cloud which is very important to the automation functions of the system. But the cloud isn’t doing everything.
Markets don’t require a single common standard to thrive
I don’t know what the future will bring, but I doubt very much if there will be one universal home automation protocol in 5 years. There’s no reason for it. The market is certainly big enough for multiple protocols as long as they all work. Just like cell phones vary.
Maybe an even better market example than mobile phones is cars. Parts are different. Fuel is different. Tires are different. Engine technology is somewhat different. You don’t even use the same tools on all car models. It hasn’t killed the market.
I think there’s room for alternatives. What’s holding back the growth of the low end home automation market isn’t the fact that there are multiple systems. It’s the fact that a lot of the systems haven’t worked very well.
I’ve said this before, pretty frequently, but I think the home automation system needs to have an MFOP (maintenance free operating period) of at least six months and preferably 12. That’s when it becomes a viable consumer product.
The functionality also has to come with better presets and be more discoverable. It’s just really weird that customers have to go through steps to install smart lighting. That should come already installed.
And no one should have to come to the forums to ask how to group lights together or how to have a motion sensor trigger a light. It’s just crazy for a mass-market consumer product to hide basic functionality that way.
I definitely agree that a single common standard would probably help with reliability. I just don’t think that’s the only way to get there.
This is why I said VIA a hub, not BY.
I may look into using a local server to automate my house, but then I may loose most of my voice interface. I like the integration I get with ST.
Basically an HA system is no different than you local LAN. It’s one small part of a WAN.
It would be cool to see an interoperable modular approach, I know there is one company that makes Zwave Radio modules, etc but I assume they stack and still work with a larger controller.
It would be neat if the way this went was there was a Zwave radio hub, you plug it into your lan and a rest api to interact with it… same with zigbee, Bluetooth LE, etc… and you can choose to use a local logic engine, or put that logic engine in the cloud.
Your Voice Remote (that’s all it is right now folks, above is are the necessary building blocks) can hit up those rest apis on the various radio hubs directly or can also hit up the rest api on your logic controller. Or you can even use a logic controller integrated in your voice remote’s cloud to make it what many aspire it to be…
I am sure this is probably close to what openhab or some other offering has or aspires but nothing has quite pulled it all together, made it consumable or it has failed to gain necessary critical mass…
A disparate but open setup… with something like this the secret sauce may just be either getting everyone to agree (or forcing it upon the market) what the API looks like and the radios can be existing standards or new (who cares)…
I, for one, am looking forward to the Ady62400 Logic Processor… and a SmartTiles control panel…
This is what Z/IP (Z-Wave IP gateway) essentially is. Only instead of the REST API it exposes each Z-Wave device as a virtual IPv6 host on the local network. Then any device on your home network (be it Alexa, Google Home or anything else) can discover and communicate with individual devices (dimmers, switches, sensors, etc.) over standard TCP/IP protocol. Such bridge can be easily built into wireless routers, set-top boxes or any always-on devices.
http://z-wave.sigmadesigns.com/wp-content/uploads/ZIPR_br.pdf
http://z-wave.sigmadesigns.com/wp-content/uploads/Z-IP_Gateway_br.pdf
I’m not saying that Z-Wave is going to win the race, but this is the direction where the industry is heading. There will be a fairly simple and “dumb” bridge to tie all legacy radio protocols (Z-Wave, Zigbee, etc.) and expose their endpoints to the AI piece (be it Alexa, GH, or whatever) as IPv6 hosts on the local network (or the Internet). This is a short-term solution to the interoperability problem.
That’s bad ass. That is the ultimate way to move into the future of HA.
Any examples of real world implementation of Z/IP?
That’s also what Thread is supposed to do for zigbee–give each device an IPv6 address.
It’s the main reason the zigbee alliance agreed to work with thread.
Nope. It was released in early 2015, but none of the home automation people have picked it up yet. It’s getting more press recently because it was exposed when the standard was made publicly available, but the residential device manufacturers aren’t using it yet.
We were just discussing this a week or so ago:
It’s a fairly new technology developed in the last couple of years. Sigma Designs makes the Z/IP reference design kit available for $49.
Makes a ton of sense. Much better architecture for the future of HA/IOT.
Smartthing’s current model is done, in that it has a lifespan then it won’t be relevant given this type of architecture.
Watch Amazon or Google launch a Z/IP gateway… and boom…
I look forward to being able to choose which logic engine to use and have the ability to have local and cloud based implementations in a high availability configuration. .