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I'm baffled at what purpose there is to voice-activated lights. Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. If I'm entering or exiting a room, I turn

I'm baffled at what purpose there is to voice-activated lights. Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. If I'm entering or exiting a room, I turn the light on or off as I pass the switch. This is going to be much faster than "Alexa, turn the computer room lights off" on my way out and then waiting to make sure it understood me. The only exception is my front porch light. I usually leave it off, but turn it on when I'm expecting a food delivery at night. Being able to turn it on from my computer room remotely could be nice, but I'm not going to begin investing into a "smart home" for that one purpose. My TV and clothes washer are both "smart", but I don't use any of the smart features, and neither have ever been connected to my WiFi. The only smart appliance I have is a thermostat, and even that one is pretty basic. It has an app that I can use to control it and create a schedule, but it doesn't try to learn when people are home.

acdha 4y ago
I think a lot of this comes back to the way everyone has been focused on building huge mainstream businesses for a long time. Many IoT devices are useful to many people but not at the scale companies like Amazon or Google want — people with vision or mobility impairments, for example, find voice control far more useful than other people but that isn’t a huge market and many of them are low income. Parents with babies probably use voice controls more than they used to but that only lasts so long and then becomes a problem until they protect the ability to have Alexa order more LEGO sets - and not anything people are jumping to subscribe to. There could probably be a medium-sized business model which works but not the kind of hyper-scale vision that SV has favored. Apple seems to have the best balance putting the smarts in devices you were already buying for other reasons, and being able to concentrate more than one promotion cycle out which Google struggles with.
__derek__ 4y ago
> Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. Not necessarily. Open layouts have taken the office and residential markets by storm over the last two decades. Many "rooms" don't have well-defined boundaries, so it's common not to have a switch everywhere someone might enter.
malfist 4y ago
If I'm cooking and have my hands in meat, turning on a overhead light, or under cabinet lighting without using my hands is helpful.

acdha 4y ago

I think a lot of this comes back to the way everyone has been focused on building huge mainstream businesses for a long time. Many IoT devices are useful to many people but not at the scale companies like Amazon or Google want — people with vision or mobility impairments, for example, find voice control far more useful than other people but that isn’t a huge market and many of them are low income. Parents with babies probably use voice controls more than they used to but that only lasts so long and then becomes a problem until they protect the ability to have Alexa order more LEGO sets - and not anything people are jumping to subscribe to. There could probably be a medium-sized business model which works but not the kind of hyper-scale vision that SV has favored. Apple seems to have the best balance putting the smarts in devices you were already buying for other reasons, and being able to concentrate more than one promotion cycle out which Google struggles with.

__derek__ 4y ago

> Light switches are always at the entrance to a room. Not necessarily. Open layouts have taken the office and residential markets by storm over the last two decades. Many "rooms" don't have well-defined boundaries, so it's common not to have a switch everywhere someone might enter.

malfist 4y ago

If I'm cooking and have my hands in meat, turning on a overhead light, or under cabinet lighting without using my hands is helpful.