Yeah, right.
Nobody in their right mind should be making their home "smart" for the convenience or efficiency. It's a hobby. A frustrating, inconvenient, burdensome, potentially expensive, challenging, neverending hobby.
It taught me to love light switches.
I now never touch a light switch.
"Computer dim lights to 40%." I never bother touching a light switch. This guys set up is too complicated. The easy way to do it nowadays is to buy smart devices that integrate with the google or alexa echo system and you just talk to alexa or google to get it to do what you want.
Agreed, but Alexa fails hard if you have no internet, and my understanding is that Google Home also becomes mostly inoperable.
I've tried Home Assistant but could never get it to work reliably. HomeKit is great and works offline if you have a home hub (an Apple TV, a HomePod, or an iPad).
It also fails hard with Internet. I’m sick of being on my living room asking Alexa to turn on the light just to get the bedroom light turned on (each room has its own Alexa/Light pair, so there should be no confusion).
For Amazon Basics WiFi smart plugs, the device type can be configured as "Light" instead of "Plug".
Echo 4 works as a Zigbee hub, avoiding dependency on a third-party cloud service.
Walls reflect sound, and things like curtains muffle it, and you might be surprised which device picks up your voice best in different positions.
I had to adjust placement etc. to prevent the Alexa in my son's room from regularly picking up my commands from my room better than the Alexa in my room when the doors are open.
I forgot to say that the problem mostly occurs when I ask Alexa to set the (unspecified, but hopefully the one belonging to the room the corresponding Echo is) light's brightness to X. Sometimes, in that case, it turns on the light from the other room.
I didn't check the audio transcript when this happens though, that's a good one, thanks.
E.g. "this request on this device refers to X", or more generally "when you hear X it probably means Y".
As an alternative, I've spent more time than I should passive-aggressively repeating the same instruction and then flagging every single failure in the app. I have no idea if it makes any difference, or if the things I've done that with that have improved were due to general improvements to their voice recognition, but it gives me some limited satisfaction (I now wonder what the financial tradeoff is of fixing the reported issues vs. any benefit potentially gained by just having the reporting function but sending it straight to the bin to make people feel like they're being heard...)
One of my goals for this year is to experiment with HomeAssistant or similar to at least start to replace or supplement my Alexas.
I’ve installed home assistant recently too for the flexibility, but until I get a zigbee stick I still depend on Alexa as the interface with the lights.
If you trust that your phone isn't listening when it's not supposed to, why don't you trust the home assistant (even if it's made by the same manufacturer)?
Do home assistants claim they are not listening when they are not supposed to?
Even if you create tasks that can function through a button press or something they still rely on the cloud.
Voice control locally is really hard though. Or at least it used to be. I thick OpenAI Whisper is available for local/offline usage if you build your own wrapper around it? I tried adding (local open-source) voice to my home system about 8 years ago, and again 3 or 4 years ago and it was very rough. It might finally be feasible with the current state of local AI.
For an example, my home robot was named "Marvin" (from H2G2) and the local detection was so poor, this is my list of "matching" wake words.
['Marvin', 'arvin', 'artin', 'marlin', 'marten', 'margaret', 'why are']
I didn't really value voice control until I had young kids.