The final part of this series examines the successful combination of individual devices, working together to deliver a smart home’s real value.
Delivering Compelling Smart Products — and Services — to Consumers
Part 1 and Part 2 of this series covered how smart designs need to deliver high value at a reasonable cost, as well as some of the barriers to design that need to be addressed to ensure success in the marketplace. However, even after a smart device is designed, there’s still a lot of work to be done. The real value of the smart home comes not from each device individually but rather from the combined interactions of all devices working together.
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is easily the most important emerging technology for creating value in the smart home. Smart sensors are like the eyes and ears of the home, collecting information about the environment as well as input from users. Smart devices are the hands of the smart home, managing the home by turning on lights or sprinklers.
AI is the brain of the smart home. By identifying patterns and anomalies in data, AI enables the home ecosystem to decide what to do with the data it collects. Consider a home safety system that uses video to monitor the outside of the home for when someone approaches the house. These systems use motion detection to determine whether an event is taking place that needs to be recorded or live streamed to a user. A primary function of intelligence, in this case, is to eliminate false detections. A homeowner does not want to be notified every time a bird flies by or a car on the street backfires and sounds like a gunshot.
One important application of AI is facial recognition. New smart door locks use AI to decide who to allow into the home. Next-generation baby monitors will use facial recognition to determine if a baby has woken up. As companies continue to develop new AI innovations, more capabilities and new applications will become possible. For example, posture detection will alert parents to whether a baby is sleeping on its back.
Initially, AI was intended to be implemented in the cloud. The cloud offers virtually unlimited memory and processing resources. However, it is infeasible to upload live video streams for processing. Furthermore, the roundtrip to the cloud and back introduces too much latency for many real-time tasks. To address these issues, portions of AI are moving out toward the edge.
AI is critical to developing the next generation of smart devices. AI is how much of the value the smart home offers will be delivered. OEMs need to understand how “smart” smart devices actually need to be to as well as how devices will interact with each other. AI is also important because it is the primary way that OEMs will be able to differentiate their products from the wide range of other offerings in a rapidly expanding marketplace.
Ecosystem
If AI is the brain, the ecosystem is the fabric that interconnects the smart home. Ecosystems like Google Home and Amazon Alexa allow users to interact with the smart home and access all of its capabilities.
Working well within an ecosystem is essential for the success of a smart product. Consumers want to bring together a variety of smart devices from many different vendors. They also want a reliable and consistent experience. For example, the voice command to turn on the bedroom lights should be similar to turning on those in the kitchen. Ease of use cannot be compromised.
Today, OEMs can verify connectivity interoperability between devices through protocol compliance testing. However, there is also ecosystem interoperability to consider as well. While Google Home and Amazon Alexa can talk to the same devices, the APIs they use to control them are quite different. This is not the only example of the need for more standardization across the smart home industry.
To help OEMs design smart products that work together, industry leaders are actively participating in events like WorksWith. WorksWith is a virtual conference that brings together major players in the smart home industry to promote ease of use and interoperability. Companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Comcast, and Samsung will be in attendance, representing all of the different aspects of the smart home: silicon and module manufacturers, tool vendors, third-party software, AI, design services, cloud services, and service providers. In short, WorksWith is a centralized event providing the training that smart home developers need to create products that “Work With” any hub or ecosystem.
The smart home market is overflowing with innovation. Over the coming years, consumers will have access to a myriad of smart devices. Artificial intelligence will enable many new capabilities through interaction with these devices. Ecosystems will consolidate functionality and simplify ease of use for consumers. By building on proven technology and platforms supported with extensive development resources, OEMs can build smart products that will be successful in the market by working together, delivering high value, and truly simplifying life.