Smart controls
Learn how to fire off your smart home’s functions with just a single finger
Assembling a vast collection of smart home gear is no longer a niche pursuit. It’s a valid option for just about anyone who wants to improve the atmosphere in their home, save energy, or automate tasks.
But if there’s one thing off-putting about today’s smart home, it’s the fact that rather than making things easier, going smart seems on the surface to add complexity to everyday tasks. What might once have meant pushing a button now means asking a voice assistant in just the right way, or laboriously firing up an app, finding the right control, and wasting precious seconds of your life.
That’s a very negative take on things. But that perception, for all its basis in reality, isn’t quite true. Take smart lighting: you can, by all means, use an app to switch your lights on and off. That might actually be the best option available in certain circumstances – we won’t blame you if you don’t want to get off the sofa to throw some light on things. But dumb controls are still on the table, too. That light switch on the wall hasn’t stopped working. Smart kit is about adding options, not taking them away, and the category doesn’t stop with actions. It has plenty of triggers, too.
So let’s re-examine that initial argument. Those apps, for all the awkwardness getting into them, pack some punch and actually offer a lot of options. For example, Philips’ new Hue app, which recently hit 3.0, even does away with a number of taps. It’s been completely redesigned with convenience and speed in mind, putting every immediately relevant control close at hand, and we certainly expect more apps to follow suit. Put the effort into using an official app, and you’ll get access to every control the way the manufacturer intended it.
Smart options
Apple’s own HomeKit system, depending on how you approach it, is both a step down and a step up from direct app control. Recently announced as being part of macOS from Mojave onwards, the Home app puts all of your devices in one quickly accessible place. This won’t stop you using the default apps – it’s just another way to control your kit, albeit one that often lacks the fine detail that manufacturers’ own apps offer. If you’re after control, though, HomeKit (particularly with an Apple TV or iPad set as a home hub) gives you so much more. You can group devices from different
manufacturers, in different classes, and operate and automate them as one.
So you shouldn’t discount apps. And voice assistants are just as useful, from Siri to Alexa to Google Assistant, once you’ve got the knack of using them. A little back-end configuration, particularly properly naming your lights, accessories and rooms in a way in which your whole family won’t forget them, means all you need is a little natural language, a clear voice, and the inclination to shout at a machine. It’s worth familiarizing yourself with your chosen assistant’s more esoteric commands, though; if you’re using Alexa, the specifics of what you’ll need to say will often depend on the particular device’s skill, whereas Siri’s interaction with HomeKit accessories is more uniform.
There is, naturally, a long list of smart kit that also works just fine without exploiting that more advanced