Saying farewell to (not so) Smarrthings

Voice control is going to be key for gaining mass acceptance and that is going to entail voice and properly functioning AI as @Benji states.

As a home with two Google Homes, an Echo Dot and Siri my goal is to have to speak the least to these assistants and have more of a fluid and dynamic system that one step ahead of me.

Right now were in the “lets make it cheap” phase. My expectations of a properly function HA device at $99 is fairly low. Once we get to the point where software maturity and hardware intersect to the point of justification for say $299 home controllers we may have a scalable system.

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This company was formed specifically to make “voice command” branded as “artificial intelligence”.

They only integrate with high-end HA vendors… well, because they don’t want to down-sell their own product!

It is still possible that the path to mass market will start with the high-end and work it’s way down (like Tesla may eventually sell economy cars… or not).

Josh.ai is $14,000 (yes, for one install), but a number of early evaluators have expressed concerns about security. It’s not quite clear how you activate it, as it doesn’t have a wake word. They seem to be aiming at crestron, which would probably be the right price range, but a lot of questions yet.

In the video demos so far, the person has to pick up the phone, tap a button, and then speak. That’s not what most people are looking for for voice control – – they want hands-free, hence the use of a wake word.

It will be interesting to see how successful this is. :sunglasses:

Thanks for digging up the “unpublished” price (since it is available through Dealers/Integrators only).

I sure wish I had a product to sell for $14,000 each! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Actually, that is the path for many things nowadays. The $80 Android tablet followed in the wake of the $900 iPad. The $300 flatscreen 42" LED tv? 14 years ago a 42" flat panel was plasma, and cost $7,000.

Competition will force josh.ai to reduce prices soon enough.

In the meantime, outside of these online communities I’m the only person I know whose front door unlocks automatically when I arrive home, the only one whose house tells him when the bathtub is ready, the only one who says “alexa, trigger hockey” and the systems turn itself on, changes to the desired channel, and deletes the announcers from the broadcast. :smile:

Personally, I don’t ‘get’ the folks who aren’t into the adventure aspect of this. I know those folks are plentiful and I accept that they exist, but I don’t get the mindset. I had a Commodore 64 waaay back in the day, and used to code in its machine language. I came up with rudimentary spreadsheets and databases among other things. And with that amazing 300 baud modem, even was able to participate in early BBS systems. It was FUN to experiment, to hammer away at it until it works!!

Likewise my current automations work well almost all the time… and the process of improving them entertains me.

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I’d venture to say that you along with nearly everyone on this forum and probably most people interested in home automation are in one of the first two groups in the pic below. Most of the population out there sees change as a threat rather than a challenge or source of entertainment. I’d a venture a guess that most of the people who get fed up with ST and leave are ones who are normally further down the adoption cycle but ended up on the early side of HA for whatever reason.

I don’t get the mindset either. Perfect example… Where I work they have been working on rolling out an upgrade from windows 7 to 10 across the company. I had the opportunity to upgrade early back in October. I knew it was coming anyway, made sense to get it over with, work through any issues, reap the benefits of the better (IMO) OS, and move on with life, so I did it. They are now pushing the updates out to everyone, the whining and moaning I hear every day baffles me, like they didn’t think it would actually happen to them. Those are the laggards I think, resistant to anything that “moves their cheese” :slight_smile:

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I’m not always so adventurous. In the work world, I am loathe to Change “for the sake of change” if something is already working well. I’ve seen far too many instances where an OS was changed (Win NT 4, update 2 anyone?) just to stay current and it crashed whole systems and in some instances entire companies. What I have is a vision of what works. To the degree that change works, I embrace change… to the degree that non-change works, I embrace that too.

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I don’t know, during the holidays I help setup about 6 different friends and family with different levels of home automation, from ST to Wink, to just using Echo and a few Wemo plugins.

Each of these users were very different on how they THOUGHT the systems did work and should work. I think us who have been using home automation and ST for awhile are very tainted on what it can and can’t do, and most average users don’t think about it.

A lot of the users that I encounter and talk to about home automation, really just want home remote control from either their phone or voice, and they don’t even think about automation until AFTER they have the remote control part.

A good example, is I set up a family member with an Echo and a few Wemo switches on lamps, and they never considered that the lamp should just turn on and off when they walk into the room, they were SO happy to just be able to tell the Echo to turn them on and off, and couldn’t even comprehend the different use cases for when they would want to turn on or off, a lamp automatically, and how long to stay on with no motion, or if there is motion in another room etc.

A lot of people who haven’t dipped a toe into home automation, really want home remote control at first and only later start to think about the automation part.

Just my 2 cents…

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How do you delete the announcers from the broadcast ?? Just curious…

Thanks

[quote=“thrash99er, post:49, topic:81162, full:true”]

[quote=“Glen_King, post:45, topic:81162”]
and deletes the announcers from the broadcast.
[/quote]How do you delete the announcers from the broadcast ?? Just curious…
Thanks[/quote]

It’s not perfect, but it works fairly well on most sports broadcasts. You need to have at least 5.1 audio going on. I have 7.1… what my process does is lower the center channel all the way down, crank up the rear surrounds and the side surrounds, and the front left and right. This relegates the TV announcers (who exist mostly in the center channel) to such a low volume they blend in with the crowd, so it sounds very much like you are at the event.

I have that occurring in Tasker, sending http commands to the Denon.

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Ah, I was curious. Clever workaround, i like the idea.

Things are getting a bit toxic around here.

We should bid our inactive member farewell and let it die.

Complaints and frustrations are subjective. I know that I have experienced the same sort of frustrations as the OP. I can identify with the anger and the need to publicly rant.

I almost did the same with this recent Wifi devices update and the fact that my Wemo’s are wonky now when they worked fine before, or when I had an internet outage and my automation completely stopped.

I don’t think we need to attack others who are probably just pissed off due to what they are experiencing from a platform that has marketed itself into this corner without the appropriate backing from corporate due to its business unit vs. business unit warlike business model.

Edit: And actually, my frustrations have prevented me from posting as often in the community due to my tendency to rant. :slight_smile:

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“getting”? :rolling_eyes: :laughing:

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OR just come up with some great HA control program and sell 1000 copies at $14 each :slight_smile:

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It makes watching the game on TV much more pleasant, and immersive with a large screen.

I have two commands that do it automatically:
“ALexa, trigger sports audio”
“Alexa, trigger hockey”

The first does just the audio, the second powers everything up and switches to NBCSN and does the audio. I use IFTTT at this time, but I’m beginning to build a custom Alexa skill for changing channels on the Bravia. It goes directly to Tasker without needing IFTTT. So who knows… that might evolve after I get it working right

Oh, I’m wondering why you aren’t using a Logitech Harmony Hub to change channels? It works great with the Echo for me.

I have a network-enabled Android Bravia TV that accepts json POST commands, and has an included IR blaster that can communicate with my cable box. Why bother with a Harmony Hub under that circumstance?

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Yea, makes sense if TV is already handling that, and has an IR blaster. I really like the Harmony, i’ve used a ton of IR blasters in the past, and different interfaces and so many work arounds, the Harmony is nice to not have to think about all the different hacking to get the devices to behave the way I want.

The way I figure it, the 65" Bravia and the Denon AVR are “here to stay” as I just got both over the past couple months and they are quite satisfactory and there’s nowhere else in the house for 'em. So a bit of programming to make them do what I wish makes eminent sense… it’s usually more fun to program the tv than watch it anyway :slight_smile:

The other thing is that I don’t want to add more hubs where they are not needed. I already have two Ethernet hubs, the SmartThings hub, the Hue hub, and two android control tablets. Last thing I want is yet another hub, especially if I can leverage other devices. And ESPECIALLY if the new hub would need line-of-sight to the home theater! So making Alexa transmit commands to the home theater via Tasker running on a control tablet was the obvious way to go. Most of it already works well enough… Now to iron out what doesn’t work, and then make it work better.

I put in a request with Denon to have their devices report the active input, along with the signal level coming into that input. We’ll see where it goes.

In re-reading this, you are likely correct… however, that future is very expensive and quite a ways down the road. Absent the insertion of microprocessors into humans (dunno about you, but I ain’t wearing a Fitbit to bed) , such a sensor would have to be able to remotely know a) there is a creature in the room, b) that creature is human and not the family dog, c) that creature’s breathing and blood rhythms indicate the creature is sleeping. And what if there are two people in the room, sleeping? How does the sensor know that, rather than imagining it is one creature that (due to the ‘extra’ heartbeats and breaths) is obviously awake?

So I’ll qualify my statement: Absent the invention of an inexpensive real-life Tricorder, within the financial parameters of a one-hundred-dollar hub system, voice control is the possibly reachable interface that can bring it to the masses. Beam me up Scotty.

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