Amazon pulled an Apple on the smart home
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I think it’s pretty cool that, in theory, I could say “Alexa, turn on the oven to 450” and it would (a) turn the correct device to the correct setting and (b) remind me when it was ready (or if it’s being super duper smart, tell me that it was 2 mins or so away from being ready) so that I could stagger over to the kitchen, pull a pizza out of the fridge or freezer, unwrap it, and stick it in the oven. All I need to do is have a bunch of speakers bugging my home, a new oven, ideally probably not two new ovens or not a new oven and a new toaster oven because god knows what will happen, and all this stuff networked.
Or I can walk over to the oven, turn it to 450, and say “Hey Siri, set timer for ten minutes” and wander off. When my wrist buzzes, I go stick a pizza in the oven and I say, “Hey Siri, set timer for thirteen minutes” and go do stuff.
I don’t need a new oven. I don’t need to worry that I’ll pick the wrong oven. I’m not inviting Amazon to parse all my conversations. I don’t need to learn a new magic phrase.
Oh and imagine the hilarity when you try to sell or rent your house and the internet gets turned off. We had a smart sprinkler system which, when we sold the house, we essentially had to rip out because it was easier to install a conventional replacement than figure out how to talk to it without an active WiFi.
This guy has a great youtube channel[1] which documents how he builds his home automation system (in house). Would highly recommend watching his videos.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUEKr_48EfQ&list=PL8mjSseObL...
Nope, it's turning it on
The paragraph after what you quoted:
[instead of buying a new oven]..
"Or I can walk over to the oven, turn it to 450, and say “Hey Siri, set timer for ten minutes” and wander off. When my wrist buzzes, I go stick a pizza in the oven and I say, “Hey Siri, set timer for thirteen minutes” and go do stuff.
I don’t need a new oven. I don’t need to worry that I’ll pick the wrong oven."
My wife and I are always (excessively) concerned with whether we left our gas stove on/off, the doors are locked and that the garage door is closed.
For that stuff, I'd be willing to pay for the ability to check on that stuff that worries me. Having said that though, knowing that you left your stove on and not having the ability to turn it off would probably be kind of pointless.
You could use a VPN to connect to the home network to control devices when you have to.
However, this can still be hacked to say that the oven is off, while it is in fact on and you’re leaving for the airport.
I never want to turn on any part of the cooker for ever and ideally this should not be an option available to me when tired.
Another way is to unplug them, because then one remembers doing that.
Ovens can also suffer failures where the gas is turned on, but it fails to ignite. This is no issue when you're there and notice the gas smell and the burners not going on. If you're not there, the house fills with gas and explodes.
Fortunately, our range is a "dual fuel" stove, which means the oven is electric but the stove burners are gas. Having said that, stuff being left on is still a concern irrespective of whether a burner is electric or gas.
Works even better with two people as you're forced to cross-check every item.
It's important to keep it a sane length and at a suitably high level, otherwise users have a tendency to skip items that are "obvious".
not even with a 2 FA?
You could manually set a timer. It would probably be quicker than saying "Hey Siri, ..." and you could also avoid using any kind of software.
It's the same sort of things that keeps happening with maps programs, smartphones, and basically any modern tech with software updates. No one can leave well enough alone. They have to put their fingerprints on it in order to advance their careers, so everyone mucks around and breaks things and calls it an improvement.
Frankly I'm just tired of expensive devices getting worse with every single software update.
Meanwhile, HomePod Siri understands her 9/10.
Every room has both, both are able to manage all devices, and Alexa was here first. Because of comprehension challenge, Alexa has been abandoned, now the only time Alexa wakes up is for TV mentions.
Note, not talking about syntax, talking about whether the words she said are what the device says she said.
Also agree about wrong devices in wrong rooms answering. Used to work, now doesn’t.
"Upgraditis" has become a scourge.
My wife has the almost identical problem with Siri. She has a very slight northern plains accent, but it's enough to confound Siri about 25% of the time.
It's worse with Microsoft's horrible "Blue & Me" system. That thing understands her only 5% of the time. She gave up on using it.
Siri understands what I say almost all the time, but only rarely knows what to do with the questions or commands I speak.
Except for one app: Reminders. For some reason, Siri has a hard time when I add things to Reminders lists. I have a Groceries list with about 30 items on it that are bad Siri misinterpretations of things that I want to buy, and I have no idea what they're supposed to be.
Things currently on my Groceries list that, thanks to Siri, that I have no idea what they are but keep them anyway just in case I figure them out later: Canned pills, Maybe to la, Bicycle, Not what I said, North, Raisin berry, Frog nodes, Special, Compound dirt.
"I'm sorry, I don't understand."
I clicked on everything on the screen, no text window. There is a balloon icon with lines in it, I thought "aha, the text chat window!" Sure enough, it opens the text chat window, and hangs up the call.
Arrgghhhh.
Microsoft has installed numerous Skype updates. I can't find any usability improvements. Things are just shuffled around, and/or broken.
I've been using Skype for 10+ years, and am about ready to abandon it for Slack.
To add a counter point, a week ago my 7 year old daughter had a great time asking one for various types of joke (“Alexa, tell me a bird joke”) at a pace only a primary school child can. It worked really well.
> I’m tired of expensive devices getting worse with every single software update.
Replying to you from an iPhone 8 that reloads the page 9 times before I’m allowed to see it, crashes every 10 minutes and has deleted all my photo albums. Yay iOS 12.
I used to be able to say to my watch, "Hey, Siri, where is my wife?" And I'd be shown a map. Now when I ask, it says I have to open the app on my iPhone. If I could use my phone, I wouldn't ask my watch!
I can have my Groceries list showing on my watch and say, "Hey, Siri, add 'peanuts' to my Groceries list" and she'll respond with, "You don't have a list called 'Groceries,' but I can create one for you."
I haven't tried since the iOS 12 release a few days ago. Hopefully it got fixed, but I don't even feel like trying anymore.
I've lost so much faith in Siri and similar technologies that the only thing I use it for anymore is once a day: "Hey, Siri, turn off the lights." And even then then there's a 5% chance of her responding, "Here are some web sites about 'turn off the lights.'"
I must admit the ones that really get to me are Windows updates that for some reason best known to the devil himself seem to be postponed until I actually need to use the computer. Or those ones where you've just done a fresh install (say) only for the system to proudly announce that it's downloading updates, then installing updates, then working on updates, then (finally) announcing it needs to reboot (okay) and then just when you think maybe it's time you can use the system - no - checking for updates - and finding new ones! Just kill me please.
This is the one thing that's becoming really infuriating lately, not only Windows but even macOS.
It's not just updates either (which macOS does pretty well), but a more general problem that the OS routinely interferes with what I need the machine to do and wastes the CPU/RAM/SSD/Network resources I need while I'm using it.
For example, updating caches/indexes requiring it to read/write the system drive heavily, running various kinds of maintenance and pinning the CPU to 100% for several minutes, or taking up all available bandwidth to do things that frequently did not need to be done at all.
Apple's iCloud Photo Library did the last one all the time until I disabled it. If you delete a large file and free up local drive space, it will almost immediately start using all available internet bandwidth to download and cache photos and videos from iCloud to fill up that space again.
Just yesterday, I discovered that Microsoft has either intentionally pushed everyone to use the "balanced" power plan or just broke the ability to select "high performance" in control panel. I had to open the group policy editor just to put it back it on high performance, because it was not possible to do it anywhere else.
I only noticed that little change because I was capturing data from a satellite passing overhead, which is not something that you can just arbitrarily delay or slow down, and right then Windows decided to reduce the maximum CPU speed to 0.49Ghz, completely ruining the data. That's not even a "real time" task, it doesn't specifically require low latency just high performance. Ordinarily that machine can handle it just fine, as long as the OS isn't actively crippling the hardware or trying to do other pointless, resource intensive tasks at the same time.
Like my rather pricey, fully automatic Nivona coffee machine which has a really hard time beating a manual coffee grinder and a French press since they don't require descaling, special cleaning tablets, or adjusting the tray sensor to notice that the tray is back in.
Or like these home audio solutions where the sound is following you around the house in whatever configuration you want but have a hard time beating a simple bluetooth adapter connected to an old hifi.
Both at 1/50th of the price.
What works and what I would like however are some simple technological improvements to existing solutions. For example, being able to check if I closed and locked the door behind me. More like that bluetooth adapter than a complex integrated solution.
Also, it really doesn't need to relay my conversations to the cloud. What a terrible trade-off for a silly gimmick.
For example - speaking of Apple - my iPad 3 is stuck on iOS9 - can't upgrade it anymore. The hardware and everything is fine, but some websites don't load correctly etc.
Migt have to jailbreak it...
And I don't understand why people are willing to have a listening device like Alexa in their home.
I'd love to be wrong about this though.
The lack of interoperability between smart home devices and a consistent communication (and security) protocol remains the most painful part. There are some good devices (open sources and commercial) helping - my $100 Logitech Harmony Hub remote has gotten more done and taken care of small projects.
It's comparable to the wild west that required manual loading of apps onto PalmOS or WindowsCE mobile devices.
It sucks, but we're the minority here.
[1] https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2018/09/17/thinking-big/
Also, home assistant integration is dead easy and it's very cheap compared to comparable products. (Especially because amazon's offerings are vastly overpriced in countries where they have no locations).
https://www.iot-tests.org/2017/04/ikea-tradfri-a-smart-light...
That's all I want. Why did the first two generations of smart home equipment require a cloud? That's harder to develop.
blegh
I'm not interested in any home automation. The ability to turn on my lights with a wristwatch doesn't have reasonable benefits compared to the risks. It's hard for me to believe that people actually put these Internet-connected, voice-activated devices in their homes. The smartphones are bad enough. That kind of automation doesn't encourage living deliberately, and the privacy and behavior manipulation (tracking, ads, etc.) issues around it are horrendous. (DIY can avoid most of those problems though.)
1) automatic lighting depending on occupancy. (this has existed since the 80's) 2) time based events which respond to either heating or lighting, maybe alarm systems aswell. 3) acces control/security
Those are basically all major systems most people would want to automate in their homes, and none of them should require voice control or a smartphone app. (heck, most could be done with discrete PLC's, although that would be a horrible UX).
This is one of the sane use cases for the cloud, IMO. Local speech recognition kinda sucks, and expecting consumers to manually update their firmware (since we've taken auto updates off the table) for new improvements is not realistic.
It's mostly just for fun but you can easily see it becoming very practical. My security system is legit; it emails snapshots from cameras to a special account that triggers a urgent notification on my phone while turning on a loud siren in the home and all the lights. I did a funhouse mode that played static on the tv and monster/police/machine gun noises on the stereo while chaotically blinking all the lights... it actually scared even me a little.
An app could just as easily talk to a local server over wifi to deliver the same convenience and remote control without any of the data grabs.
Some of the new apartment buildings in Chicago come with Alexa built in to a wall panel. If you live there, you cannot escape it.
I find it really hard to believe there isn't a viable way to a home assistant / hub that leaves control and privacy in the home. The whole IoT, app, with constant data harvesting and selling is not what I want in the home, just control and ability to buy without all the dystopian baggage.
It all seemed so much more promising back in the days of X10 and keeping automation on the LAN.
Edit: X10 was launched in 1978. No wonder it could do with a refresh!
KNX works fine, it is a broad standard with a ton of support, the issue is it's massive pricepoint and fact that almost every hardware device that has support for it comes in a DIN package. (which is fine for large scale buildings with utility closets which have DIN rails, but not for your average home).
X10 still exists, and modules are still sold (for about a tenth of the cost of KNX modules from a quick search), but it's an ancient standard and very limited compared to what we might now expect. On, off and dimming are about the extent of its abilities.
Also, most software server front ends for it are horrible. I am actually wondering if building a relatively cheap KNX hardware module for home assistant might just not be the best option in that regard.
Amazon is not deceptive in their sales tactics, which I appreciate. They identify likely needs, and provide me with options for meeting those needs. They provide a service. They’re like a personal shopper who leaves everything on your door step.
You pay for it, but you’re mostly happy to because it’s kind of a win win (except for the pickers). Sometimes you still save money, and you almost certainly save loads of time. They’re capturing your information in an effort to better serve you. You could say Google is doing the same with their direct products, but you’re not the one paying for those benefits, so you have to worry who is and what they’re getting out of the dynamic.
At least with Amazon you know they’re doing it to get money from you, and you can choose to give them that money or not. It’s a much more straightforward dynamic.
https://advertising.amazon.com/ad-specs/en/aap
Also not for nothing but this is the same kind of thing we all said with Google early on and now we're all beginning to pull back on it.
They have no reason to sell the data - it's their crown jewels and competitive advantage.
Not only slightly creepy, also entirely worthless trash as a feature. I couldn't care less what people in my geographic area are buying. It showed me results for a lot of things for cats - I've never owned a cat.
It seems like literally everyone in the domain is thinking of how to exploit the customers first and serve them second with security as an afterthought at best.
Alexa is especially bad about the last one given they are stupid enough to include a voice interface for skills installing and don't rigorously check the word selection or confirmation before installing unknown software.
But Amazon seems to still believe that voice interactions are not just a feature of future smart homes, but essential. I have never seen the need to voice control anything in my home, and I likely never will. I don’t want AI I want simple, cheap reliable and interconnectable automation hardware.
The first home automation tech I want is normal lightswitches everywhere and a hotel style master switch at the front door. The home automation/smart home tech I can easily get is a speaker that can order things?
I think IKEA seem to be a lot closer to revolutionizing smart homes than Amazon.
The only thing I don't like is using it to turn on the bathroom light, but only because the noise might wake up others in the house.
Nobody "needs" any of this stuff. But once you factor in laziness and convenience, "normal" people are willing to make tradeoffs.
I know I don't need Alexa, but when you've got grocery bags in both hands and it's dark, being able to turn on the lights by voice is handy even though it's far from "needed". And when it works well enough most of the time, it's easy to become dependent on it. For some things, voice is way more convenient than pulling out your phone and fumbling with an app (like changing a setting on a Nest).
A slightly related but different example: I just tried installing a pihole in my network, and it ended up being a total headache.
My wife likes using deal sites for shopping, and they like to redirect to a half dozen tracking sites before landing you on the e-store you want. And of course, the pihole got in the way of her shopping. The pihole ended up being way more trouble than it was worth and got decommissioned after only a couple of days, as white listing is a time consuming cat and mouse game I didn't want to play.
My wife cares more about her $5 shopping rebate than she does her information being passed around to marketing companies, because the tradeoff is worth it. I don't think my wife is much different from most normal consumers in that regard.
They seem to think that "we'll let others sort out the actual smart home, and we'll provide the controller for the smart home, because that's how we corner the market for ads/purchases/subscriptions whatever". I can see the angle they are approaching it from, and it might make sense short term business wise, but unless peoples homes actually get smart soon, their Alexa will be collecting dust after a while.
> being able to turn on the lights by voice is handy even though it's far from "needed".
The Alexa doesn't do that though, it only does if your home already has a ton of smart home stuff! So it's an interface to control a smart home (or if you prefer the common terminology - make an automated home a smart home).
If I buy smart speaker thing and say "switch the lights on", it will find a lonely Hue smart bulb somewhere and switch it on. But the chance it will actually switch the bulb on is only 50% because if the last person to switch it off used the wall switch, the light won't come on! So a smart bulb is fundamentally incompatible with a normal dumb wall switch! Add a smart wall switch, and you no longer need a smart bulb! So the smart bulb concept is useless for any lighting fixture that has light switches.
And most lighting in newish homes these days isn't in bulbs at all, it's in spotlights built into ceilings etc, or it's a light in a window, connected to a power socket. This is the problem. "smart home" tech is in its infancy and there is a myriad of different standards that don't solve the problem of being 1) cheap, 2) able to replace dumb tech in existing installations 3) complete (in the sense that the lighting gear can actually fit ALL lighting in a house, for example) 4) not make existing tech worse, such as in the hue+switch example. The quality of a new smart switch can't be flimsier than the 90's switch it replaces. It can't fail even one time in a million to switch the light off. When smart tech fails, it must become working dumb tech. If these giants really wanted to make my home smarter- they could push to standardize or even subsidize better smart tech. That's how they will get into peoples home long term.
> My wife cares more about her $5 shopping rebate than she does her information being passed around to marketing companies
When people tell me that they feel that way, I like to tell them a scary privacy story. Doesn't need to be true, just a plausible dystopian near-future. It could be about how the "quick quote" on the medical insurance site shows a vastly different amount than her friend of the same age and medical history - and she can't help think it's because she recently visited an online pharmacy with a referrer being a google search for a scary symptom. Something like that.
Very true. My house already did have smart home stuff, and that's actually the reason why I got an Alexa (it had a reputation for being good with smart home devices). And after getting an Alexa, its usefulness made me buy even more smart house gear.
A simple motion/heat detecting light does what you need here, and is probably more reliable...
The biggest issue is the lack of a universal standard. A home is not a smartphone you can replace every 2 years. Things are measured in decades, and changes may require expensive and time consuming work in addition to the cost of the product itself.
I looked into home automation when I had to work on an old house. I looked into KNX, which seemed to be a good standard: adopted by several manufacturers, robust, etc... The biggest problem, beside the price, is that I can't buy the hardware I want (ex: A/C unit) and expect it to connect to my network. Most of them don't have any smart feature, and those that do are restricted to a single system that even if it lasts may not be what will be popular 5 years from now.
In home building, almost everything is standardized. Power plugs, dimensions of appliances, pipe fittings, etc... Smart home won't take off unless it is the case too. Any yet, maybe because it looks like the next big thing, companies try to lock down the market instead of first working together. The worst part is that the "smart home" is not a new thing at all. We had most of the technology decades ago, it never took of for that reason, and it seems like all we can do is repeat the same mistake.
Cloud and AI are new but it doesn't change the deal at all. If you can't get appliances to talk the same language, it isn't going to work. As for the incentive for the companies involved, getting your money or getting your data is essentially the same thing.
You could integrate KNX into IP, but that would require another server which is either dreadfully expensive, or just way to complex to maintain for an average house.
Also, i don't know how it is in the US, but many buildings around my area lack any proper cabling infrastructure because they are ancient. Things like having cable gutters for ethernet and coaxial connections.
Most have a single coaxial cable coming in from the floor directly into the living room. (because that is where the TV/radio used to be).
These buildings are unlikely to be broken down because of their high value, but renovating them would cost a fortune. Currently no proper standard for wireless home automation exists.
With perpetual cloud support, the long term maintenance costs of a novel connected device are much lower, and there's less of a chance that your smart devices suddenly die after a year or two when the manufacturer kills that product line. If done right, this could mean the ability to buy any off-brand or startup device product and not worry about losing ongoing support. This could significantly increase choices and lower costs for consumers, and gives Amazon an even more powerful voice in the ongoing direction of alexa-integrates products.
It's also a brilliantly unique move, in that no other company can offer the same blend of services around a smart home device. Conceivably, Amazon could enrich this with purchase and provisioning, i.e. every device sold through Amazon.com gets a certain lifetime support guarantee and arrives at your house provisioned for your wifi. This could make experimenting with new gadgets a lot lower risk.
Microwaves also seem like they have little use compared to things like a stove or oven. Atleast i personally have barely used a microwave when cooking.
Over 90% of the US owns a microwave. (Though sales are apparently dropping)
https://www.google.com/amp/s/qz.com/187743/the-slow-death-of...
They're too inexpensive to not buy due to cost, and they're too useful (even if only used in rare circumstances) to disregard as a part of a kitchen. They take up a small amount of space, and come in numerous sizes to fit spacing requirements.
Essentially every supermarket in the US also has a frozen meals (ready-meals as you say), or equivalent, aisle. The items in those aisles appeal to just about every price point these days. They're clearly still quite popular.
The microwave at work on the other hand gets loads of use.
98.6% of households own a microwave.
https://www.census.gov/history/www/homepage_archive/2015/oct...
A few months ago I bought a house that did not come with a microwave. For the first time in my life I had to shop for one. And... I quickly learned that there are microwaves with "Inverters" that solve the microwaves cook from the outside-in problem. They've existed for like 20 years now.
The one I bought also has some sort of sensor for auto-magically heating up leftovers.
It's amazing and barely cost more than a standard one that would have fit the cabinet space.
Don't buy cheap microwaves.
It’s a no-brainer for IoT companies to integrate with Alexa at this point. The problem is that nobody in the IoT industry seems to care about security, and Amazon does not seem to care about privacy.
P.S.: Samsung does make some good quality hardware in a few areas. I don't know if the same can be said of Amazon.
Disclaimer: I work at google, but in an unrelated department, and have no inside knowledge / reads about what is going on with fuscia, and so my opinions aren’t more insightful than any other random engineer on the internet.
I'm curious how long Google!Android will be supported once Fuschia launches. Maybe 2-3 years, and it depends on how many existing Android devices can move to Fuschia.
Android's strength over Windows Phone was the app ecosystem and I don't think an emulator will instantly be good enough to emulate all kinds of apps with sufficient performance, especially games.
Plus, it's not like Android will suddenly become less viable if it were to drop from ~85% to 65% market share.
Amazon really tried to make FireOS work as a google-free mobile OS, but just never got the volume. Ok, I guess they still sell those $50 tablets or whatever, but millions of Firedroid devices is still a rounding error compared to billions of Google Playdroid devices, or even hundreds of millions of Baidroid devices. Network effects dominate - even Apple has a hard time with maps for exactly this reason.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-ins...