Is smart home DOA? No, just Changing [CBS NEWS]

Oh, I’m well aware of your own very practical applications for this technology, and I’m more than glad to see it providing those sorts of real life-improving benefits. But that doesn’t represent the lion’s share of the HA/IoT/etc market, either current or potential.

BTW…and I don’t mean this in a snarky way, I’m genuinely curious…in 55 years I’ve never seen a light switch mounted that high on a wall before. Is that common in some places?

It’s from a HUD case in New York City. When electricity was first introduced in the 1920s and 30s, many people put switches up quite high to keep them out of the reach of children. There are number of public buildings and some apartment buildings in NYC that have switches at 6 feet high. There are even some where the switches are 7 feet high.

Well in all actuality my father in law moving in and not being able to reach the lights," forgetting" to turn on/off the bathroom fan was the exact reason I first started with automating them. Of course he’s been gone for 2 years now and I just keep going .

2 Likes

That’s great that we have another example of the technology providing that sort of benefit. But that doesn’t really counter my point.

Respectfully, I think this is a very accurate description of one group of home automation users. But it does not describe all home automation users.

There have been multiple members of this forum who have posted about a practical requirement that they were trying to meet at a price they could afford.

Whether it’s people with family members who have cognitive challenges, or people who themselves have physical challenges due to disability or ordinary aging, this is a very real market for Home automation.

I think it’s important to recognize that as well. Certainly it would drive some of the design decisions differently if the staff really understood that it isn’t always as simple as just walking over to the light switch or popping the batteries on a sensor if an automation fails.

Samsung themselves has acknowledged this market segment:

Obviously I was generalizing, and not intending to describe each and every user of the technology.

Of course. I thought that was covered by the very first sentence in my post:

“We all talk about and seek out applications of IoT/HA/whatever that actually provide some practical benefit to us, and that seems to be our main focus.”

My whole point was that the “coolness” factor of the technology is an under-recognized part of what motivates many (perhaps even most) of us to buy this stuff and wrestle so much with getting it to work together. At no point have I stated or implied that the practical benefits you describe are of no importance, so I’m not certain what this is all about.

1 Like

Selling an ‘illusion’ to those with disposable income is what prevents many to buy into the HA and moreover is what prevents companies like ST to take full responsibility for their reliability. Until this mentality changes, we probably won’t see the progress that some might expect on this immature market.

1 Like

You appear to have misunderstood me. I didn’t say anything about being sold an illusion by anyone. I was talking about actually seeking the illusion (with the full understanding that that is what it is) of “intelligence” from the systems we’re hobbling together, as well as some of the individual components. ie, the human tendency to want to anthropomorphize things. I thought the specific examples I gave made that pretty clear. Perhaps not.

1 Like

I was giving you a hard time for your closing paragraph. But I do get the point you were making, in that the coolness factor sometimes outweighs the utility factor.

Another interesting point in alignment with yours is that I think people are much more forgiving of Siri, Cortana, echo, and hey Google than they are of say a pushbutton switch. There is just a natural tendency to think “oh she didn’t hear me” and to treat the interaction as one more like that of one with another person.

Obviously, just as with the person, too many failures become annoying. But I know there have been a couple of studies, although I couldn’t find them right this second, where people consistently underreported the number of recognition errors with hey, Google. So voice had a higher level of user satisfaction because of this conversational perspective.

That’s a case where the illusion has a practical value in that it increases customer satisfaction for an imperfect technology. :sunglasses:

1 Like

I hate coming into these threads late, because people have generally already stated a lot of points…

With that said, I’m on the boat for full Iron Man Jarvis Super Lazy Future George Jetson House thing. That’s a pipe dream today for the most part, but I don’t really care about practicality… :slight_smile:

I also hate the compromises… I would GLADLY have a box the size of a mini-fridge that did EVERYTHING that I want, complete with 63 antennas and 30 blinking lights that sounded like a convection oven, as long as it did everything and it did it 100% reliably.

I don’t care about a somewhat smarter home or the allure of my fridge texting me when I’m low on eggs. I want it all. I want conversational egg ordering type of stuff… hooked to Peapod or Instacart or whatever. I think this is where the conversational bots that Google seems to be alluding to is going to come in handy with Google Home, but they’re famous for killing promising products and leaving early adopters in the dark, so you never know.

Oh, and I just kind of don’t wanna pay too much for that though… a reasonable price point would be nice. :slight_smile:

6 Likes

I once attended a marketing course in the 90’s when I was an account exec for a large Corp (they just loved to send people to training in those days). We, of course, needed to learn about our customers and what their body language could tell us about the kind of buyer they were.

To be honest, what I remember most about this training was the self assessment. I and the other account exec there with me both learned that our make-up was:

I want it all, I want it now, and I want it forever!

I’m all in for the 30 antenna appliance that does it all at a reasonable price with 100% reliability.

2 Likes

Wall-E world, here we come.

3 Likes

This thread went off the rails fast. Miley would be proud.

Thanks for the article link, good read.

1 Like

I just do it to be cool… :sunglasses:

3 Likes

Paging Diogenes. Diogenes to the white courtesy phone, please.

2 Likes

Interesting conversation.

I really don’t care, or at least don’t think I care, about AI or a desire to have a concious home.

I don’t use or have plans for Alexa or the like. I can’t stand Siri or Ok Google, and I perceive Alexa to be in the same category.

What do I want out of HA?

  1. Automated control of devices/switches based on events.
  2. Security functions - which isn’t really different than the above, although good security requires some add ins (authentication, backup cellular).
  3. Rich Data - mainly for security. As I can get the above much more reliably with old school systems.

Given that, among many other things, Alexa (in conjunction with an Alexa-enabled device, like the Echo) can act as a voice-based natural interface to your HA system I wouldn’t tend to view it as being in the same category as either Siri or “OK Google”, at least not in this context.

I realize that not everyone sees value in such an interface, but just out of curiosity…what exactly is it about the nature of such interfaces that you dislike so much?

So does “OK Google” with Wink :slight_smile:

It’s unnecessary. Echo is not an HA device, it doesn’t “automate” anything. It’s just a fancy remote, a voice controlled one that has nothing to do with HA.

1 Like