21 ms·

Ask HN: Why is the state of “smart home” devices still so dire?

41 points by bgun 3y ago

Reading through the comment section on “I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35849060) made me realize: Is there no company smaller than Google or Amazon or Apple willing or able to make a better smart home device? Especially now with AI solving the language-proficiency problem in talking to these devices, it seems like the rest of the product is just API integrations with a few hundred smart home hardware vendors, and some easy lookups like weather and calendar. Is there something I'm missing about why the current generation of these still suck so bad? As a weekend project I bolted speech-synthesis and speech-recognition to ChatGPT (and have seen similar "Show HN" posts) and immediately had a more interesting conversational partner than Alexa or, god help them, Siri has ever been. Why are three of the most profitable technology companies in the history of mankind unable to come up with better than Google Home, Alexa, and Siri? Is there some unusual challenge here that I fail to understand? Plenty of people I know would spend $500-1000 (not to mention the lightbulbs, appliances, or various “smart” gadgets) on just the smart home “brain” itself, and not even for something HN folks might consider “ideal” (privacy respecting, no ads etc), but just for a device that actually, usefully, and consistently does most of the things these devices purport to do. Why can’t three different trillion-dollar companies even manage that, and more to the point, why aren’t there more billion-dollar companies even trying?

cratermoon 3y ago
> Why are three of the most profitable technology companies in the history of mankind unable to come up with better than Google Home, Alexa, and Siri? Because none of those companies are in the business of providing a useful service to end users. Google sells ads, Amazon sells marketplaces, Apple sells consumer entertainment system. None of them went into the smart home business to address the needs or solve the problems of people using the devices. They all intended to use the devices to expand their cores business and make it more profitable.
- bgun 3y ago
  That's a fair answer but only addresses half of my question. There do exist companies (some large ones) who are in the business of providing useful devices or service to end users; why aren't any of them building smart home devices? Where is Sony? Samsung? Bose? LG? Dell? Is it even possible to make a decent smart home hub and turn a profit?
  - artntek 3y ago
    Samsung: https://www.smartthings.com/ https://www.smartthings.com/
  - rblatz 3y ago
    There is, it’s all high end and you have to go through a salesman and a whole system design to even get accurate pricing.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Yep, here's one, and it's on the lower end: https://www.savant.com/host https://www.savant.com/host ("only $5k to $20k" some site said) - there are others that are so eye-wateringly expensive you can only hear whispers about it, usually in support documents for already high-end equipment like in-window automatic shades. You can mimic one with a lot of work via HomeAssistant and some programming; the secret is you can create virtual switches that you can then use Siri to turn on or off to trigger activities.
      - Animats 3y ago
        The trouble is, the stuff that's any good requires planning, wiring, and installation. Nest's thermostat doesn't even need a separate power source, so it can be sold at Home Depot. As I've pointed out before, home IoT ought to include duct damper controls, vents and fans to the outside, and sensors which measure temperature, humidity, CO2, and maybe other pollutants, both inside and outside the house. Then they can use outside air when appropriate. You can buy all that. It's common in commercial building control. Honeywell and Johnson Controls, old-line building control vendors, sell this stuff. It requires some engineering for each building. That's why it's rarely seen in homes. Some years ago I went to an IoT meeting in the Dogpatch area of San Francisco. The meeting was in a big room on the waterfront, in a refurbished industrial space. The room had skylights with glass vents that could be opened and windows onto the Bay that could be opened. Both were controlled by a manual endless chain, which could have been motorized without too much trouble. There were ceiling fans, and a standard dumb HVAC system. None of this stuff was interconnected. With a big group in there, it should have sensed rising CO2, opened some of the windows, cranked up the fans, and run the room without active HVAC until sunset. Then it should have gradually closed the windows as the room cooled, kept the ceiling fans turning over, and added some heat. Once everyone left, it should have briefly ventilated the room thoroughly, then closed up everything, stopped the fans, and let the room cool down to 60F or so while unoccupied. But no. That's building automation. Hotels go for this stuff, because they have big energy costs and a huge range of occupancy, especially in function rooms.
- nr2x 3y ago
  “Apple sells consumer entertainment systems” So you’ve never seen anybody write code on a Mac?
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    I write code on a Mac, all day. I still maintain that Apple is primarily a consumer entertainment system provider. The iPhone and iPad drive Apple's revenue. The Mac is to the iPhone and iPad what Visual Studio is to Windows. As Steve Balmer once said, "Developers! Developers! DEVELOPERS!"
    - nr2x 3y ago
      Hard disagree, counter point being Nintendo. They make pure entertainment devices, Apple may also be in that market, but nobody is running Excel on a Switch.
      - cratermoon 3y ago
        For the most recent year I have information, iPhone was 47% of Apple's revenue, services 21%, Mac 13%, wearables and accessories 11%, and iPad 8%. (rounded) Macs are barely more of a revenue generator than wearables and accessories, which is stuff like Apple Watch, iPod, Apple TV, Beats Electronics and Apple-branded and third-party accessories. Services is iTunes Store, the App Store, the Mac App Store, the iBooks Store, AppleCare, Apple Pay, licensing and other services. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-revenue-of-apple/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re... Apple is an entertainment device company that happens to also sell the development platform for iOS, and that platform can also be used for other kinds of development, the kind that supports the backend. A good thing, too, because Apple's cloud services and data centers use Linux and a lot of other non-Mac things necessary for Apple's services to generate revenue.
ftxbro 3y ago
I feel like it's because capitalism is incentivizing these corporations to turn your home into a battle-space.
- esafak 3y ago
  Wouldn't competition incentivize them to get better? And besides, why are they individually getting worse over time? At least Google's products are definitely not performing as well as they used to.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    They aren't getting better because they're accessories; very few people will "leave" the ecosystem they're in just because the smart home stuff is shit. Instead, they learn to live with whatever it does.
    - esafak 3y ago
      This is not enterprise software that gets foisted on people; we're talking about consumer hardware. I won't hesitate to sell mine or at least stop using it.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Sure, but for many people dumping Siri would require dumping their iPhone, which is tied to their Mac, which is tied to iCloud, etc, etc. I suppose it would be possible to use one voice assistant at "home" for the smart-home stuff and another for the phone, but the hassle for most people is too much.
  - cratermoon 3y ago
    > Wouldn't competition incentivize them to get better? The Free Market Fairy is a myth. On the flipside, maybe the free market has already had its say and given the idea thumbs down.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
idontwantthis 3y ago
I don’t think the mega corps invented any of their smart home stuff. They acquired small companies that made good products then tore them to shreds to mine data and sell advertising which is how they make money.
- nr2x 3y ago
  I wish there was still a path to have a profitable mid sized company, period. It’s either get acquired or killed by a big company.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Most of those profitable mid-sized companies are aiming to get acquired. Like, building to a profitable SMB then exiting is essentially what this site (ycombinator) is all about.
    - nr2x 3y ago
      Agree, I just think it’s a sad reflection of where we ended up both tech industry in general and societally as well. The local cafe is now a Starbucks, your bank is now part of JPM, your favorite utility software just got acquired and killed because there’s no way to show you ads on it.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
Siri has a reputation that isn't deserved. I have ~50 HomeKit devices in my home and, most of the time, Siri-via-HomePod works perfectly.
- bombcar 3y ago
  Siri has regressed terribly since sometime when they added "ML" to it. You really have to learn the exact magic incantations to get it to do what you want (hint: shortcuts and scenes can be named whatever you want and can help). I wish there was a simple document listing all the commands Siri knows, but you can't find one.
  - ohwellhere 3y ago
    I’m an early HomePod adopter and it’s gotten worse every year. My kids and I constantly make fun of it, yell at it in exasperation, or give up and do a task manually on the phone. The big speaker still sounds nice though.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      I absolutely love how the same command - "Siri turn off living room lights" works most of the time but sometimes turns off all lights in the house, and sometimes doesn't work at all (but Siri doesn't complain that it didn't understand you) and sometimes turns off half the lights. The last one is really rare now, because I grouped them together in the Hue app first.
- switch007 3y ago
  You must have the exact voice it’s trained on and use the precise wording it expects at all time lol. It is beyond parody for normal people Hey siri play the best by Tina turner Now playing the best of by some random band you’ve never heard of in a genre you’ve never played
  - bombcar 3y ago
    I should start a band called "Siri" and intentionally name all tracks and albums impossible names like "cancel this command" and "random Mexican radio station". I don't know how I do it but asking Siri to play Mexican Radio [1] works about 50% of the time, but the exact same sequence of words often just gets a Mexican radio station heh. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUjbOcO_hT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUjbOcO_hT0
majormajor 3y ago
I just don't think the "spend $500 to $1000 on a brain" market is that big, especially with the big players giving you stuff for so much less currently. If you want something that's not cloud based you can get it, but I think it costs more than that. I haven't gotten quotes myself, but per here it's in the thousands (tens of thousands if you go wired): https://www.electronichouse.com/home-lighting/weighing-wired-against-wireless-lighting/ https://www.electronichouse.com/home-lighting/weighing-wired... Business-model-wise it's probably either that "pay $$$$ up front" or "pay a subscription" and how many people would really pay a subscription vs just using the Google/Amazon/Apple systems?
nostromo 3y ago
Use HomeKit, it’s great. If you want to use non-HomeKit items, you can use a RaspberryPi and run HomeBridge. Or you can just stick to HomeKit items (which are unfortunately more expensive and limited in selection). I see you’re mostly unsatisfied with voice controls, but Siri is pretty good with HoneKit controls. Or you could just use your phone.
- guidedlight 3y ago
  HomeKit is great. HomePod hardware is great. Siri and HomePod software is terrible.
  - nr2x 3y ago
    100%. Google Home has its share of issues, but Assistant and Siri don’t exist in the same universe. Siri is just kinda sad tbh.
- cr1895 3y ago
  I’m truly puzzled why “Hey Siri tell me the temperature in this room” and “Hey Siri tell me the humidity in this room” is fine but “Hey Siri tell me the temperature and humidity in this room” might as well be gibberish.
  - bredren 3y ago
    It is because of a set of contributing factors: talent, org disfunction, high bar for exacting product expression of a refined brand, and more. This article is paywalled, but put to rest the “why is Siri so bad still?” question for me. [1] One of the details reported I found most compelling was that internal dissatisfaction w Siri’s ability is so great that the headset team seriously considered using an entirely new / different voice system for its product. [1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-struggles-as-new-ai-era-begins https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-st...
rektide 3y ago
No one is willing to give up control. Unlike the PC era where the computer was the user's, all these systems are part of various walled gardens. Really excellent loved cared for neat experiences just don't happen in corporate isolation, or they become mismanaged over time. Even if a corporation does do good for some folks, who they target wont match what other consumers want. The whole IoT era is plagued by draconian old-world corporate power-control games, which are unrefined crudity compared to where PCs had been headed. Some healthy standards & protocols that actually leave users in power would start to cleanup the toxic waste dump operating-regime these products are in now.
- bruckie 3y ago
  I'm hopeful that Matter will be one of those "healthy standards". It's local-first (no cloud connection required) and enables interop between lots of different devices (no more "made for Alexa" or "works with Google home"). It's unclear to me, though, how pervasively it will be adopted. The incentives in the IoT ecosystem are really hard to align in a way that creates great experiences for customers. (I work tangentially on IoT at Google, but speak for myself.)
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Adoption seems much better than expected considering most major brands already have a bunch of devices that support it, and it hasn't been that long since spec v1 came out. Plus there's still a whole slew of device categories not yet supported until spec v2.
- saberworks 3y ago
  > No one is willing to give up control. Agreed. I recently moved into a new house. The builder put in a "clare smart home system." This included a clare home display mounted in the hallway with an inward facing camera. This device is exclusively controlled by security/smart home companies that contract with clare. I have no option to disable the camera, disable the phoning home, etc. In fact, before I can do anything meaningful on the device, they required an in-home appointment where they would set up every smart device in the house for "free," but future additions would require a paid service call for them to come out and set them up. I had emailed them asking about whether there was an alarm system, and before I got any reply I found an option on the display to activate the alarm. Which I did. But before it actually activated (it gave some sort of countdown), I pressed Cancel. It prompted me for a PIN, which I could only get from the installers. I had no option to cancel the alarm other than to cut power to the device, but once I pulled it off the wall it started wailing a tamper alarm that wouldn't stop until I pulled the backup battery. Oh and I found out later that it was snapping photos of me against my will and without my permission. Please note this all happened before the in-home appointment (which never happened). I canceled the appointment, permanently tore the thing off the wall, and it's destined for a landfill because the only way to get it to work is to activate it through that alarm company. Oh and they won't even return my calls/emails after I canceled the appointment. I tried calling them to see if they wanted it so they could use it as a warranty replacement or something, instead of putting it in the garbage. Every "smart" thing they put in this house sucks. The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected, I was getting constant alerts of suspicious people in my neighborhood, with attached photos of black people walking on a sidewalk. what!? It turns out it didn't recognize my address so connected me to some default place in Texas (I live in Washington!). There was no way to manually select a location, so I guess I was going to get false, racist alerts until such time as Ring decided to recognize my address. I reset it and canceled my Ring account. I'm going to replace it with a normal door bell button. This is getting thrown in the garbage as well. The "smart" z-wave switches haven't been connected/activated so should function as normal switches right? Nope, they do this stupid dim/undim thing and periodically completely fail to work until I turn off/on the circuit breaker. Another 5 items destined for a landfill to be replaced by regular switches. The smart front door lock (keypad) and smart garage door openers have never been connected to anything and I'm going to leave them that way. I really wish there was a hardware kill switch that would disable all wireless connections and leave them in a dumb mode. I'm worried someone else can come in and connect their phone or something, since I've never set them up. (in case anyone wants a free clare home panel, PM me an address to mail it to and I'll send it; rather have someone tinker with or hack it than trash it)
hot_gril 3y ago
The issue with smart home is it's mostly a solution in search of a problem. Ring was a rare success because it was solving a real, pre-existing problem.
theshrike79 3y ago
There are better things coming, like the Matter standard - a join operation with the Zigbee Alliance, Amazon, Apple, Google etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matter_(standard) It allows different brands of smart devices to talk to each other without having to buy the smarthub for each brand separately. "Matter products run locally and do not rely on an internet connection"
dreamcompiler 3y ago
Home automation stuff is fairly easy for hackers to build themselves, but you won't get VC to start a company to build these things without: 1. Requiring an always-on connection to the Internet, regardless of whether a local wifi peer network would suffice. 2. Requiring a proprietary hub in the cloud that serves as a bidirectional relay. Extra points if you can charge a monthly fee for this service. 3. Requiring anytime remote firmware updates that the user cannot veto. All these things enable the HA company to snoop everything that goes on in your house and sell this data to advertisers. They make a lot more money from this than from the sale of the devices. And that's why I only build my own HA devices.
- intelVISA 3y ago
  This also applies to smartphones thanks to Google's 'SafetyNet'
- Spivak 3y ago
  > Requiring an always-on connection to the Internet, regardless of whether a local wifi peer network would suffice. There's lots to be had in the local polling / local push categories in https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/ I haven't found very many smart things in practice that force you into internet connectivity.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- checkyoursudo 3y ago
  > And that's why I only build my own HA devices. That's cool. My kid is a budding (pre-tween) engineer, and I have technical/scientific skills but no engineering skills. Have you made anything like super entry-level that might be a project for a couple of no-knowledge-yet enthusiasts? (I just considered for the first time ever that this might be a good starting point for my kid's "real" engineering work. So far it's been kits and toy-things.)
  - 3y ago
friend_and_foe 3y ago
Because touching a switch on the wall is easier than speaking a codeword and then telling the thing what to do. There's just no market. It looked snazzy when it was coming out, there was good hype, and then people actually experienced them. It's just not that cool and less useful than a clapper.
- hot_gril 3y ago
  The lack of a real goal makes most of these products unfocused. Automated lights and stuff are geeky, not practical.
  - rcarmo 3y ago
    People with limited mobility tend to disagree.
    - hot_gril 3y ago
      For whatever reason, these products aren't designed or marketed for people with limited mobility. If they were, they'd have a clear goal and maybe even a subsidy.
- elisiariocouto 3y ago
  I disagree, there is a market. I have a couple of very handy automations in my house, like, when I turn on a light swith (an analog, classic one), HomeKit turns on a floor shade in the end of the room. Also, when the sun sets, a roller shade closes
reissbaker 3y ago
1. OpenAI's APIs have only solved the language problem reliably for a relatively short time; it takes a long time to develop consumer hardware. 2. OpenAI's APIs are expensive, and building an alternative datacenter for running the open-source LLMs at scale is even more expensive (and probably not allowed under their licensing). And even bigco private LLMs like Bard are presumably pretty expensive for their creators to run. So, "the AI is free" model of Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant doesn't easily port itself to the newer tech. 3. If you try to avoid that by running the models locally... Getting reasonable performance requires expensive hardware, so something like a $49 Google Home Mini is out of the question for now. I think it's super likely that at some point, the current generation of home assistants are gonna get walloped by the better AIs we've seen developed. It just hasn't happened yet; someone needs to a) do it, and b) figure out the pricing model — either offer enough value that subscriptions become worth it vs worse-but-free alternatives, or sell some kind of larger-use-case at-home-AI box running local models that can also do home assistant stuff. Or just wait for the cost of running the models to come down, at which point you can just 1:1 port the current experience over, except you end up with much smarter assistants.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Imo the big problem is that running the NLP for these devices is already expensive. Alexa lost $10 billion last year. I don't think the other smart homes are doing particularly well. Why would any VC want to get involved in this space when the largest tech companies have been in it for close to a decade now and are nowhere in terms of monetizing or even breaking even on the devices. And then you realize transitioning the response to an LLM would make the device even more expensive and the business makes no sense at all.
  - hacker_gal 3y ago
    do you really need an LLM should be the question. Re smart home devices, I haven't seen anyone using it other than setting an alarm, timer, turning on/off the lights, playing music, checking the weather and so on. Probably there are max 1000 things. you can have an end-to-end spoken language understanding rather than speech-to-text and nlp separately. other than big tech, smaller speech companies - snips, picovoice, sensory are all doing that. just because amazon has billions of dollars to acquire user data, or acquire and kill smaller companies, it doesn't mean it's the best or only way.
asdfk-12 3y ago
Thread / matter network seems to be beginning to integrate connected home devices across the big cloud vendors. Door & window sensors, temp/humidity sensor, lock are 'endpoints' and use low power, light bulbs & strips, switches act as mesh nodes. Highly responsive and seems reliable. I use Apple gear.
mattlondon 3y ago
IMHO - and having messed about with this stuff for years - the best way to go for smart home stuff is only use devices that use MQTT over WiFi. I use Shelly branded devices which I've found to be quite good and pretty open. ZigBee just seems way too unreliable. WiFi devices have - for me at least - been rock solid in terms of reliability, while ZigBee stuff randomly disappears or needs to be relinked all the time (and it is hard to debug when this happens, unlike just pinging an IP on your LAN) Home assistant et al are typically overkill and another point of unreliability. Just run Mosquitto (MQTT broker) locally and run a local NodeRed instance if you need anything sophisticated in terms of logic. Since you are using MQTT it is trivial to write your own app for controlling everything from your phone. Use tailscale if you need to do things when off-LAN.
thesimpleone 3y ago
I believe one reason is because it’s completely unnecessary. Like the rektide also mentioned people are unwilling to “give up control”. Many people see large corporations and because we’re the “21st century” believe that everything that is made should be the best or is somehow the most advanced thing and therefore should be far superior. Unfortunately that couldn’t be farther from the truth in many ways. Items made are often times just pushed out there because they want to be the first at a growing market, without really really caring what the best for the consumer is. They want wants best for their pocketbooks, what turns a profit and positions them as the leader in the minds of the masses. Security is usually an afterthought. Actual need and what’s best for humanity is even further down in that list. Feeding big data machines will never be what’s best for individuals needs
blacklight 3y ago
I wrote two articles on how to build custom voice assistants using just a Raspberry Pi and a microphone, one in 2019 https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-your-customizable-voice-assistant-with-Platypush https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-your-customizable-... and one in 2020 https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-custom-voice-assistants https://blog.platypush.tech/article/Build-custom-voice-assis.... It's definitely doable and I still have my own custom assistants in the house. However, I had to get around with a Snowboy model for hotword detection (and Snowboy is now basically abandoned), Mozilla DeepSpeech model for speech-to-text (and that's quite heavy), and Mycroft's mimic3 text-to-speech model (and Mycroft is now basically bankrupt). Then writing the integration is relatively easy - I used Platypush, but it can definitely be done with Home Assistant and OpenHAB too. Compared to 3-4 years ago, I think we're now in a state where the content is no longer the issue (just plug into a LLM, and all of your text requests will get an answer), nor integrations are a problem (just write a Platypush event hook on speech detected, and you can connect it to everything, no need for "Works with Google/Alexa" labels). Text-to-speech synthesis has also become cheap and ubiquitous. But the hotword detection and speech-to-text models are still IMHO the bottleneck. Hotword detection is a field where you need a very small and lightweight model that only detects a specific word or phrase in a very reliable way. Snowboy was an amazing FOSS project - which also came with this cool idea of "crowd-funded models", where in order to download a model for a certain hotword you were first supposed to provide three audio tracks where you say that word in order to improve the model. But it's now discontinued because it cost the volunteers too much to run the infra. And Mozilla DeepSpeech is a relatively good choice for general-purpose speech-to-text, but it's heavy (it takes 100% of the CPU when it runs on a Raspberry Pi) and it's mostly optimized for English - even support for other Western languages is patchy. If there are other open-source alternatives that solve these problems, I'd be very happy to learn about them. Once these blockers are removed, there should be really no reason for anyone to feed their audio streams to Google or Amazon.
- hacker_gal 3y ago
  it's still expensive and not easy to build reliable models. thus open-source is not a sustainable option for maintainers. you have to have talented people and high quality data. talented people have opportunity cost, they can go to big tech with high 6 or 7figure TCs. some former mozilla people did. i'm not criticizing them, we gotta accept the cost of living is crazy. i care about my compensation too and i do not have energy left to contribute to foss. i salut those who can. you cannot compare donations vs. big tech TC unless you have a trust fund i guess. I don't have old money, so not sure about that part. snips.ai is acquired by sonos. google and sonos are still in patent wars. i'm not sure whether sonos will survive. it's not easy if big tech lawyers come after you, even you are kinda big. mycroft was a part of patent war too and the poor guy dedicated all of his energy instead of trying to build something. https://mycroft.ai/blog/huge-win-for-mycroft-at-the-patent-trial-and-appeal-board/ https://mycroft.ai/blog/huge-win-for-mycroft-at-the-patent-t... spokestack.io is no longer active. stability ai will probably go bankruptcy or aws or nvidia will acquire them: https://futurism.com/the-byte/stable-diffusion-stability-ai-risk-going-under https://futurism.com/the-byte/stable-diffusion-stability-ai-... picovoice.ai tries to do things differently, combining on-device speech processing and subscription based model. it's the only company i know that has good hotword detection and speech-to-text. their free option is enough for my project https://picovoice.ai/pricing/ https://picovoice.ai/pricing/ you may ask why nobody uses their tech to build an alternative voice assistant. again i dont think smart speakers are profitable enough. when you can buy an echo for $20 it's hard to find somebody to pay $20 per month. silicon shortage and logistics costs increased the boms. it's not easy to compete with amazon which can burn $10 billion. openai api probably feeds their audio streams to microsoft. otherwise why would nuance move to the cloud when they can process on-device, right after microsoft acquires them. to find options not feeding big tech, we gotta start paying for non-big tech.
wojciii 3y ago
I really don't need the current generation of smart devices. They are trying to solve a problem by applying quick fixes which don't work very well or need maintenance (changing batteries). I need a smart home where the built-in devices communicate and change behaviour based on sensor input and a controller where I'm in control of the software and open standards are being used. This also means that everything should work without internet access. Needing internet to turn a light on is pretty stupid. I'm thinking of you IKEA. I'm not going to waste my money on any smart devices before this happens.
Ekaros 3y ago
Only long term money is in services. And vendor lock-in looks good to executives. To make money you need to keep selling devices and that is hard. Having someone first pay for devices and then monthly fee is much more profitable. This model applies to many industries.
taylodl 3y ago
Whew! There for a second you had me scared something had happened to X10! But nope, it still exists and they appear to be bigger and better than ever - even working on Android and Apple devices. I haven't looked at X10 in years, but I have some buddies that were really into it back in the late 90's early 2000's. https://www.x10.com https://www.x10.com

cratermoon 3y ago

Does that idea of a smart home really appeal outside the HN/Popular Science crowd? Perhaps there's no compelling use to constitute a market worth pursuing? Perhaps the only real customers for the technology are the ones that can buy and sell the profiles collected from the private habits of the end users.

bombcar 3y ago
There are a few actually useful things for a "smart home" but much of it can be replaced by intelligent design during the build. For example, the master bedroom should have four-way light switches [1] such that the lights in the room can be turned off by the switch next to the door, the switch next to the bathroom, and a switch on either side of the bed. Even a "home theater setup" switch can be created by some intelligent lighting choices (turn off main lights but turn on "audience lights" which triggers the screen to drop down, projector to come on, etc). [1] Once at 4-way, you can go to N-way by chaining as many as you want: https://matthews.sites.wfu.edu/courses/p230/switches/SwitchesTut.html https://matthews.sites.wfu.edu/courses/p230/switches/Switche...
throwaway173738 3y ago
I think the problem is that all the products put the user in control of a switch that happens to require wifi and the internet to flick on or off. There’s very little value in replacing light switches. Other players in the space that are successful provide things that are better that switches. Hue, for example, lets you change the color of your lighting. Nest lets you warm up your house before you get home. There’s some interest in better switches. I think the best switch of all is going to be to anticipate the user’s needs and adjust the house to them. It’ll likely be in a range of subtlety between closing the blinds for you when you’re about to walk through your living room naked and giving you a light show if you put dance music on. The reason you probably won’t ever see it is because not everyone wants the same things and it’s difficult to intuit what anyone wants without being told. You have to solve some pretty big social problems with technology to make it seamless for normal people. The most sensible approach might be to somehow clone your consciousness into a machine and let the machine control your house. This would probably make a great Black Mirror episode.
waboremo 3y ago
Considering it's estimated at $80bn and expected to grow to double that by 2026 in NA alone[1], not sure how you can say it's just a HN thing. Even in home building its impacts are huge, with most home builders now having plenty of smart home packages, such as Mattamy in NA partnering with Ecobee and Fernsby. People expect more from their homes. Perhaps you might be viewing smart homes in too narrow of a view to recognize how wide spread it is. [1] https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-smart-homes-market-industry https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-s...
- cratermoon 3y ago
  Oh, I know new construction of both single-family and multi-family is a big market, but that's at the behest of the developers. The people buying and renting don't necessarily choose those things, and many renters would prefer their landlord not be able to control their home. Their choices are then limited to whether or not they are able to find housing without smart features. Again, the question comes down to whether or not the residents are the market. > People expect more from their homes That sounds like housing industry hype. People want an affordable, safe, secure home. They don't necessarily want or even need to check the status of their HVAC over the internet while on vacation in Maui.
  - waboremo 3y ago
    Sure, they want a safe secure home, and part of that is smart home features. I don't know why you're really downplaying it here, it's not as if smart home features are exclusive to the "dumb" things like checking HVAC over the internet. You can look up plenty of statistics regarding smart homes, and every one of them shows growth, and increase of demand. Especially considering smart homes cost more, this isn't a limitation, as most smart home packages are an additional cost to their rent/purchase. Going back to Mattamy, this is an additional monthly subscription. Again, I don't understand your attempt to downplay this. It seems narrative driven rather than objective. You want to believe something is true, so you come up with ideas like landlords being enough of a big market to double smart home industry in 3 years.
defrost 3y ago
The amount of command and control that goes along with a modern high end North American home with basement HVAC, under floor heating, etc. has appeal outside of this crowd and outside of home use. I deal with a lot of small to large farm | market garden | light business queries and many people are interested in fully digitally metred water (scheme + bore) | power | gas usage with fine control on reticulation, powered machines, furnaces, etc. There's less interest in voice controlled automation and far more in fully logged + spreadsheeted resource usage and scheduled operation patterns. There's keen interest in early notification of failures, leaks, spikes, etc. This overlaps "home" in the sense that many of these queries are coming from people that live where they want these systems.

nunez 3y ago
> The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected The Ring doorbell absolutely works as a mechanical doorbell if it's hard-wired into the doorbell system in the house...if there is one. Other than that, totally agree with you re: built-in "smart home" systems. They are cheap systems builders use to drive the home price up that you don't have much control over. If we build our own house, I'll ask for non-smart devices but replace them with my own. I LOVE our smart home stuff.
- saberworks 3y ago
  > The Ring doorbell absolutely works as a mechanical doorbell if it's hard-wired into the doorbell system in the house...if there is one. When the ring doorbell lost wifi, because we changed ISPs, it no longer functioned as a doorbell. When pressed, it would only make the chime outside at the button, it would not ring inside the house. Yes it's hard wired to a doorbell inside the house. When connected to wifi and active, when the ring doorbell button is pressed, it will ring inside the house one single time. Then it starts recording, by default for 2 minutes. During the time it's recording, if the button is pressed again, the button press is completely ignored. So by default you can ring the doorbell 1 time every 2 minutes -- anything more often gets ignored. There is a huge bug report / thread about this on ring's site and they just say it's by design. When the ring doorbell is completely disconnected from wifi and reset back to factory settings, it indeed functions as a regular doorbell. But it also has a spinning light that notifies everybody that it's not set up and is not recording. My brother in law works for a home builder that installs Ring doorbell buttons by default on all their homes. He said he noticed that about half of them get replaced with a regular doorbell button or a different "smart/camera" doorbell within a few weeks of initial move-in.
  - nunez 3y ago
    Very interesting. I didn't know it was this nuanced. Thanks for breaking it down!

korse 3y ago

I disagree. Replace 'smart home' with 'automated home' and then compare to the mature 'automated industry'. You can have a small basket of protocols, hardware vendors and strategies which all do roughly the same thing. You pick a set which meets your budget and complexity requirements, install, tune and go. You've got some baseline 'standards' for control voltages, sensor types etc. and some real STANDARDS for safety, wiring and so on but everyone still has their proprietary sauce and attempts to keep people in their ecosystem. It makes money and gets things done anyway. You know what makes industrial automation a pain in the ass in mid-sized businesses? People wanting the benefits of automation without the burden of fully quantifying the process to be automated. This is the problem with 'automation' in the home. You need someone who can quantify the 'home process' and figure out what routines can be delegated to the automation in order to provide a tangible benefit. Some changes may need to made to human behavior for the automation to be beneficial. Which changes are acceptable, which not etc. This is hard enough to do in industry and expecting it in every home seems... optimistic. Until this gets sorted out, I don't expect to see anything other than the continuation of the 1950's 'labor saving appliance' revolution coupled with invasive home entertainment systems and the next wave of 'clap on, clap off' lights.

rektide 3y ago
Yeah we are very differently aligned. To me, there's The Cluetrain Manifesto as gospel, preaching that giving people great capabilities & connectivity & letting us tinker & explore & meddle around unlocks all the interesting neat spaces & the invisible hand starts shuffling us towards optimal patterns, towards spaces which have been winning. "The street finds its own uses for thing", and exposing the things & making them flexible & malleable & observable, making them built on good open protocols accelerates the OODA spirals to each user finding their own great success greatly. By compare, I feel like you are preaching a delivered from on high careful slow growth, where every home needs weeks of consultants to come in & carefully outline the next 20 years of use cases & then carefully select & hardcode exacting picks for that home. Open source is already kicking ass. Home Assistant is the shit. We just need an ecosystem of devices that are even 1/2 as user-exposed as the software doing the driving is. We need to fuel what is possible with devices that are willing to meet us in finding out. Not more stodgy slow encumbered methodical processes.
- korse 3y ago
  I guess I haven't seen many people doing 'useful things' with home automation tools despite how they've proliferated. It all seems like change for the sake of itself, rather than for genuine benefit (aggregate time savings, less stress etc). Standard home tasks that take up the majority of time in my experience are (time quantity decreasing) cleaning, re-organization/shelving, cooking, laundry and managing maintenance. Flipping switches and queuing entertainment items are negligible. I have yet to see a 'smart home' system that changes this calculus (aside from the humble robot vacuum) and even then, I see very few people that are able to keep spaces uncluttered enough between 0 and 4 inches above the floor for a robot vacuum to actually do a better job than the human with a vacuum in any reasonable amount of time. I agree we don't need in-home consultants or a monolithic bureaucracy. I just don't think people are ready to hyper-optimize their existence enough for automation to be truly game-changing in the home. Maybe without kids or a partner, but definitely not with.