Smart Home Industry Looks Past Voice Control to AI, Interoperability
BURLINGAME, Calif. -- Voice control is passé, found an audience poll at the Parks Associates Connections conference Tuesday. Audience members on a panel on future directions of smart home interfaces in a text poll viewed artificial intelligence (59 percent) as the technology that would have the biggest impact, followed by interoperability (20 percent), voice control (11 percent) and robotics (7 percent). Panelists said the industry's focus is moving beyond smart speakers to AI and to interoperability.
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Miles Kingston, Intel general manager-smart home group, called the smart speaker “the first device where AI was at the foundation of the user experience,” downplaying voice control. “It’s AI that’s going to help us transition from today’s really connected homes to tomorrow’s smart homes,” he said. Amazon Alexa evangelist Jeff Blankenburg called contextual awareness “the next big thing,” where a machine makes decisions that a human would make “without your interaction.” It's the next “no-UI UI,” he said of user interfaces.
Honeywell sees a multi-UI universe ahead, said Daniel Behrendt, Honeywell Connected Home business development lead. Looking at the different comfort levels consumers have with technology, some will see the cognitive level as “creepy and never move on from there,” while others will move readily along the technology upgrade chain, he said. Blankenburg views interoperability as a missing link in the smart home UI because nontechies won’t take to the smart home if smart thermostats, light switches and cameras can’t work together. Kingston said smart speakers are a good way to introduce digital assistants into the home where they could tackle “lightweight use cases.” He looks forward to what they can accomplish with more sensor data in making “more useful recommendations.”
Voice will always be a favorite UI among minimalists, said Monika Gupta, Cognitive Systems executive vice president-marketing and product. She pushed sensors working together to automate activities consumers perform routinely so they don’t have to think about turning on the radio at the same time every morning, for instance. Multiple sensors could contribute data indicating it might be a bad time for the radio to go on based on learned experiences, but more advancement is needed, said Blankenburg.
Too much competition can impede smart home growth, some suggested. Gupta said the smartphone market is large enough to bear the segmentation into two ecosystems, but it’s tough on smaller companies having to choose among the four major players.
Too many options and devices also has downsides, Kingston said. “You don’t need to have all of this horsepower sitting around the house being underutilized.” Having six different ways to watch Netflix via a TV, Blu-ray player, Xbox, Fire TV and other devices, he said, is “redundant."
Conference Notebook
Samsung Senior Vice President Yoon Lee canceled a planned keynote, scheduled for Wednesday at Connections, with no company replacement. Lee was expected to discuss Samsung’s vision for the connected home “as the place where we can hang our digital hats.” A Samsung spokeswoman told us there’s no change in the company’s direction on smart home. At a morning panel on smart home platforms, Brett Worthington, vice president-global business development for Samsung SmartThings, gave an update, saying SmartThings is operating in 88 countries as Samsung’s IoT platform for consumer and vertical markets. SmartThings, bought by Samsung 4 1/2 years ago, is now the global app on all Galaxy phones, and it provisions 2018 Samsung smart TVs and appliances, Worthington said. Providing scale, Worthington said Samsung sells 56,000 smart TVs and 47,000 mobile phones an hour globally. The strategy behind SmartThings is to leverage the size of Samsung within those device categories, he said. Worthington cited a goal given at a 2015 CES address by former Chairman BK Yoon to connect all Samsung devices by 2020. “We are ahead of that strategy,” Worthington said. “We will have all smart Samsung devices connected to the SmartThings cloud by 2019.”
Broadband service providers have the most to gain from the connected home, said an attendee text poll during a panel on smart home business models. Respondents rated ISPs first (35 percent), followed by product makers (16 percent), electric utilities and security monitoring companies (13 percent each) and insurance companies (9 percent). Tech support companies and healthcare companies ranked low at 5 percent and only 4 percent of attendees saw retailers as most likely to gain from the connected home.
Six percent of U.S. broadband households self-installed a security system in Q4 with cost savings the lead driver (39 percent), according to Parks Associates data. Other reasons for self-installations: it looked easy to install (35 percent), users would better understand it through self-installation (28 percent), enjoy do-it-yourself projects (28 percent), concern a professional installer would damage the home (18 percent), concern a pro installer wouldn't do the job correctly (18 percent), "I do not like to have installers in my home" (14 percent).