A 100% fully automated smart home is a fucking bad idea. Might as well sign your death certificates. Our family had one such system (not Alexa) and it controlled the whole thing. Yes, we should have researched better but the sellers were really convincing. Anyway there was a malfunction and it trips multiple breakers in our house. Our rhought at the time was to get the fuck out and called the electricians. Guess what? The doors refuse to open properly, so we had to climb over…
If anyone really really really wants a smart home, please only assign the system for mundane tasks like music, lightings. Dont do it for security stuff like doors, cameras.
Or just dont install one, even better.
If a home automation product isn’t self hosted, it can fuck right off
Alexa+ is a lobotomized version of the original. Since the “upgrade”, a simple request for a wholesome sesame street clip results in playing the beezleblocks music video (which starts with a girl dead in a bathtub full of water holding a cinder block) - true story.
“Alexa, please find local pediatric therapists”
I just saw an ad for Alexa+ at a family member’s house and was a bit surprised initially. The last I had known about the personal home assistant market was that both Google and Amazon were growing bored with its lack of annually doubling revenue and were slow-walking their whole participation in it to the grave, slashing those departments and walking back forecasted products.
To the home automators like you and others, am I mistaken or has it seen a resurgence now that they realize they can take another crack at it with LLMs this time?
Quote: “This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask.”
Why? Seriosly! The author spent XXX kWh energy running AI because is lazy to switch ON damn coffie machine?
I’m so glad my wife & I never got sucked into using things like Alexa.
Or, you could just get up and flip the damn switch. And if you want it warmer turn up the thermostat. This is not hard.
Call me old fashioned. But when I press the brew button on my coffee machine, it works every time. No internet, apps, or ‘smarts’ required. Just consistent quality.
Coffee machine??? I hand-grind my coffee every morning in a mortar and pestle and then use my Rok to manually press the perfect espresso.
But I also let a self-hosted AI model control the lights and HVAC in my house, cause it does it way better than I ever could manually.
I don’t even need a timer for the microwave oven. I just rig that shit up where when you close the door, it cooks, and when you open it, well it stops cooking.
Don’t ask why, had to temporarily fix things for my mom. At least we didn’t have kids around the place…
Edit: AI can suck my nugz…
Yeah, me too. But home automation has its usercase: just think about an holiday home where you want to turn on the heating and the boiler the day before you arrive.
Sure, you can ask a local friend to do it for you but being able to do it remotely is nice.
The real issue with smart home adoption has been proprietary formats all vying for dominance and fragmenting the market. I don’t think AI has changed much.
Matter (and Thread) are a huge change to the SmartHome landscape because they’re open protocols and have well-documented standards - and they’ve finally begun appearing in big manufacturer’s line-ups such as IKEA.
Once their availability spreads I suspect a lot more people will get into running their own local (eg HomeAssistant) smart home because they won’t have to do the ‘ok do I need z-wave or ZigBee or HomeKit or IFTTT or Hue or Tuya or… you know what, fuck this’. It’ll all be the same protocol and communications and config & debug will be much easier.
When you know which xkcd it is before you click it…
There’s an xkcd for everything, isn’t there.
Its not wrong, but the major attraction to Matter is it must allow devices to operate locally (not tying them to cloud services that die every internet outrage, or permanently when the service retires), and it’s an application-layer protocol. Meaning it can operate over WiFi, Ethernet, or Thread.
Many existing smart home hubs have been able to program support for Matter and simply send out an OTA update to add certified Matter support.
I suspect the average smart home is not based on home assistant, but on an ikea hub with their app, or similar.
If you are willing to selfhost a home assistant, then it is not a barrier to add various antennas to it.
So this step to standardization might help mixing different manufacturer products easier. We will see how standard their implementations will be. We had zigbee as shared standard in theory what only worked properly with the manufacturers hub.
For sure. IKEA is a great place to start (or stay), as it’s a cheap ecosystem and their app/implementation doesnt require permanent internet access - functions fine during an internet outrage, and quite privacy-respecting.
HomeAssistant is not anywhere near as hard to set up as it used to be. If you have an old mini-PC retired from work sitting around there are HA images for PCs now, and it’s pretty simple to set up to use your IKEA hub (or whatever you have already), while adding a huge swath of optional features.
I agree it’s still not something your average Joe will set up, but the continual lowering of barriers will get more people into running a self-hosted local config is a great thing for privacy and expanding the hobby.
