A Smart Home Can Be … Smart, Real Smart

Content Insider #898 – Your Connections

By Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com

“We do use focal points sometimes to guide someone to a state of heightened suggestibility.” Missy Armitage, “Get Out,” Blumhouse Productions, 2017

Back in 2016, the demand for internet access was going crazy.  

Two of our friends jumped on the online multiplayer game craze, YouTube was emerging as a video place to go and folks were constantly checking out pictures and videos.

Through all of the mayhem, John Landgraf, FX’s boss, made the wild prediction that peak TV was dead.

Are you kidding, John?  As far as we could see, the scripted day/time TV was just hitting its stride.

O.K., it took us a couple of years to agree that the TV bundle was too expensive and streaming was the wave of the future for our home video entertainment, and we cut back on our relationship with our cable provider.

Look, nothing beats FTTH (fiber to the home) for connection to the outside world.

Maybe Brian Roberts, Comcast CEO, quietly agreed with Landgraf because he (O.K, not him but his people) finally let us get rid of the bundle contract.  

Then they turned around and made us an offer we couldn’t refuse–broadband, 5G wireless–a “nice” streaming bundle (Netflix, Peacock, Apple TV) to go along with the wife’s Amazon Prime bundle and Pluto/Tubi ad-supported services. 

Some people like to say the cable guy has thrown in the towel. 

Not true! 

It’s just cleaner and more profitable to rent the pipes rather than deal with the networks, sports franchises and others.

O.K., so Landgraf is finally right and folks (except for the “older” crowd) have come to depend on the internet for their news, information (real and fake), entertainment and stuff.

Global Presence – Broadband and wireless internet is now available to almost everyone on the globe to deliver them entertainment content and AI-enabled tools.  

Today, more than 5.45B folks around the world have an internet connection. Northern Europe is the most connected (97 percent of the folks) and North America is second and Western Europe is third.

O.K., we’re one of the 1.5B households worldwide that have fixed broadband but it’s arguably more reliable and more secure than wireless–especially if you’ve totally jumped on the smart home bandwagon, which we haven’t.

Sure, there were plenty of smart home things to admire at CES a couple of months ago.

This year, they were even smarter (and more helpful) because they now include AI technology.

The problem is we’re just not all into all of the AI-enabled smart home things.

Tomorrow’s Reality – Okay, so the smart homes you see in the magazines don’t look like yours or any you’ve seen but they are … sterile.  

First of all, have you ever seen – really seen – an AI-enabled smart home out in the real world?

Yeah, we’ve seen all of the dazzling pictures but never one in our neck of the woods.

Nope!  We have a regular house that the family has made into a home and sanctuary.

And we sure as heck don’t have a TV wall that they’re hyping … nope just an ordinary 55-in 4K smart TV that we dumbed down.

Smart Entertainment – There’s nothing like a family night around the TV where the first one with the control gets his/her choice and the rest go to their own devices.  

We realize that MNTN and other analysts have found that 34 percent of the households worldwide have a smart TV and in two years, more than 50 percent will take advantage of enjoying their stuff on the set (80 percent of US households) but…

We prefer to let our cable guy gather and manipulate our data because they’ve been doing it for years and haven’t screwed up … yet.

More importantly, the set manufacturers – LG, Samsung, Vizio/Walmart, whomever – didn’t bother giving us a discount even though they’ve been notorious for harvesting/selling viewer data and using the great installed camera you can use for videocalls to check things out.

In fact, they want your smart screen to be the hub of your smart home that includes all of the appliances which they also sell.   

Just sayin’.

Don’t Look – Even if your refrigerator tells you food is past its use-by date, we know you check anyway and beside you’re the one that has to throw it out.

You know, like refrigerators that will tell you when your cottage cheese/veggies have gone bad or that you’re low on milk.

Thanks, but we’re also sorta smart and know how to open the door and see the withered vegetables or see the brown stuff on the cottage cheese.

If the milk carton is light, we’ll simply add it to the grocery list rather than have it ordered/delivered by Walmart, Publix, Aldi, Heinen’s, or another grocery store.

Nope, don’t want them to know about our junk food habits either.

Coming Through – A robot vacuum is sorta neat as it roams the house memorizing every nook and cranny while you step around it or get out of its way.  If only it was dusty.  

When it comes to smarts, we admit those robotic house cleaners are kinda’ neat.

Of course, we still have to pick up the big chunks.

And the idea of it “learning” about everything in our house and putting the information into memory – somewhere – is just a little scary.

Besides, Celia has been cleaning our home for years, locks the door behind her when she leaves, hardly ever breaks anything and even talks to us if we’re home.

Let There Be Light – AI ready lighting lets you remotely control whether they’re on or off with your smartphone or when you simply enter/leave a room.  

We tried some of the smart lights but the idea of coming in, lights on, leaving, lights off just seemed weird.

First of all, it felt a little like using the bathroom at the gas station (no we don’t have an electric car) – go in/light on, business, go out/light off … done and done.

Besides, the house had light switches installed when we bought the house.

In addition, we figured we needed the exercise, and it was good for our manual dexterity.

True, we do have to “occasionally” tell the kids to shut off the lights when they’re not in their rooms but it’s just a way to keep in touch with them.

Temperature Control – A good smart thermostat can help reduce your heating/cooling cost with voice control and remotely with an app.  Newer models learn your schedules (when you’re home or not) to adjust indoor temperatures accordingly.  They can even connect to your home cloud.  

We’ve always liked the idea of a smart thermostat and this year, at CES, they were even smarter.

The problem with ours is that the wife likes it on the cool (cold) side while we’re partial to heat.

The thing went nuts trying to please us both, so we solved the problem.

Started wearing a sweater … it’s easier than arguing with the two of them.

Your Castle – An AI-enabled home security system can constantly monitor door/window access and security cameras. Comprehensive systems can be voice- or app-activated as well as sound alarms when things go awry. They can even call emergency services.  They store all of your home’s activity in the cloud so you can check in no matter where you’re at.

O.K., we get it … life is different from when we grew up in a small town.

Back then, we walked to school uphill – both ways, played outside till it was dark, folks would occasionally leave the keys in the car when they dashed into the store for something, and nobody bothered locking their front door.

Today, no way!

Yes, we have an all-house alarm system and sometimes we even remember to activate it when we’re out.  

When we get home, we walk into the house and in a couple of minutes the alarm company calls us on our cellphone to make sure it’s us.

Darn!

Not sure why we bother with it.  We live in a quiet cul de sac, and nothing ever happens here.  

If it does, a couple of older ladies know about it.

Outdoor cameras?   

Why bother?

Neighbors on three sides have them all around their homes so they, their alarm companies and whoever else is tapped into their storage cloud know more about what’s going on than we do.

We’re not totally backward … our kids gave us an Amazon Alexa a couple of Christmases ago.

Hi Alexa – With a well-connected home, your virtual home assistant can find your audio or video entertainment, keep track of important lists for you and, with the right connections, it can control all of the systems in your home.  The more you use it, the more it learns.  

Neat … it will play our fave music when we ask it to, give us the news highlights and keep track of our shopping list when we tell it so we don’t forget what we wanted to remember when we went into the next room where we were going to write down something so we wouldn’t forget.

Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri Home pod are all interesting and store stuff in the cloud to remember for us.

A somewhat positive thing about them is that unlike the kids, they are always listening.

We know because a few weeks back, when we watched a movie it was decided it was going to give us a news update.  After a little “discussion,” we finally said, “Alexa shut up and go to your home page.”  

Unlike the kids, it obeyed.

But we know it was just sitting there, listening, gathering more info and sending it to the cloud.

Yes, we know all of those smart devices/services are appealing and even a little handy.  

It would be nice to control the lights in the house remotely, so they went on/off at different times while we were on a trip.

It would be comforting to use our smartphone to check all of the cameras in the house to ensure everything is in order.

It would be neat to adjust our thermostat when our plane landed after a holiday so we could walk into a nice warm house.

Setting the timer on the coffeemaker?  We do that after adding fresh grounds.

We still have to put the clothes in the washer/dryer so turning them on isn’t a backbreaker.

If something ultimately – and at the worst possible time – breaks down … we’ve got a guy.

No, we’re not handy around the house.

Yes, he comes pretty quickly, fixes the stuff and is reasonable.

Glass Houses – Corning Glass did an excellent job a number of years ago, giving people a peak into the totally enabled home where all your information is instantly at your fingertips saving you time, energy and even thought.

The smart home isn’t new.

Corning wove a beautiful story around it back in 2011 (https://tinyurl.com/32bv56hs) and it was a fantastic look at how we would interact with our information and home.

Tech-Enabled – There are a lot of reasons people want to make their homes more AI controlled for safety, security, assistance and perhaps even a feeling of companionship.  The more information it has, the better it serves the household but …  

But now we have more folks telling us how important/beneficial the technologies are for our homelife–especially with all of the learning/serving that AI is providing as it makes us feel safer, more comfortable, more relaxed.

Smarter – Once a household has high-speed internet connectivity, there are a growing list of AI-enabled smart devices you can install to make things easier, better.  But they need to be easy to install, need to work with other smart products in the home and be safe, secure, reliable.

Actually, we think they’re simply trying (and succeeding) to make folks feel a little deprived if we don’t have all of those connected things talking to other things and doing stuff for us so we can…

Hey, we’re not judging … you be you.

All of the AI-enabled things you installed are to make your life easier, save energy, save money.

So how’s that working for you?

Smart Energy Measurement – The utility industry even came up with smart meters to monitor your energy consumption and send the data to the main office so their system can automatically send you a bill, thus improving their cashflow.  

Yes, you’ve reduced your energy consumption … congratulations.

So you can expect giant savings on your utility bill but…

The utility company goes to the state regulatory commission and says, “Guys we need more money to operate and support our customers because well, we just do.”

So, the government people look at the ledgers and say, “Oh you poor guys.  Damn we’ve got to get you some more operating capital.  Wonder where in heck we’ll get it from?  Oh yeah!”

BAM! your utility bill doesn’t go down.   It goes up!

Hey, it’s a government thing … they pass the “savings” on to you.

Moving On – You probably never thought much about it when you were adding all of the AI and smart devices to your home but don’t worry about it, it’s a “selling feature” for folks who buy your house.  Of course, all of your data is still in the cloud, and you’ll probably have to start from scratch on your new home’s improvements.  

And if you’re done with all of those super powerful, super connected devices and think they may have all the data they can from your present house, you can sell and start all over again.

Just think how great the next owner will feel because of all of the work you’ve had done, and they try to figure out what the hell you’ve done and what knows what and where all of their thoughts/secrets are being hidden…used.

The new owners may get a little frustrated and say what Rob Williams in Get Out said, “Hey man, I ain’t makin’ this shit up. I saw it on A&E. That is real life.”

fJust tell them not to worry because as soon as all of the AI-enabled smart devices get to know them, you’re sure the devices will warm up to them as Rose Armitage did when she said, “You were one of my favorites.”

Besides, you will have moved on and will be ready to let AI make your new home smarter, better for you.

Kinda’ gives you goosebumps of anticipation, doesn’t it?

Yeah, right!

Andy Marken – andy@markencom.com – is an author of more than 800 articles on management, marketing, communications, industry trends in media & entertainment, consumer electronics, software, and applications. An internationally recognized marketing/communications consultant with a broad range of technical and industry expertise especially in storage, storage management and film/video production fields; he has an extended range of relationships with business, industry trade press, online media, and industry analysts/consultants.