USA TODAY International Edition
It’s not just you: ‘Smart’ homes are confusing
Companies like Samsung working to simplify IoT
You thought choosing a smartphone or deciding whether to buy an Amazon Echo rather than Google Home was hard.
Now try coming to grips with which smart light fixture, faucet or fridge to buy. Get past that, and good luck setting everything up.
Smart speakers such as the Echo and Google Home have helped give a prominent voice to Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant. On Feb. 9, Apple will jump into the fray with its long-delayed HomePod smart speaker controlled by its own famous digital assistant Siri.
But the tech industry is on the clock to start making good on the near- and long-term prospects for other products and services inside our increasingly connected and artificial intelligence-driven society. These are the voice-driven devices, appliances and cloud-based products populating our kitchens, living rooms and bathrooms, not to mention outside and in the car.
It’s not hard to buy into this idea of ubiquitous virtual assistant-infused devices that get to know our routines and serve our needs, whims and passions. They’ll help us find something to watch on TV, warn us if we’re out of milk, signal there’s an intruder in the house or a pipe is about to burst.
“Our vision is if Alexa is truly your assistant, you can imagine her getting smart enough to say, ‘You left the lights on in the basement; do you want me to turn them off?’ ” Tom Taylor, senior vice president for Amazon Alexa, said in an interview. “That for us is where it is truly an intelligent assistant instead of a simple replacement for a switch.”
Samsung Electronics’ new South Korea-based president HS Kim wants the abbreviation IoT to connote “Intelligence of Things,” rather than the term currently used, “Internet of Things,” a nod at where the business is growing.
And yet for all the ambitions the industry has for the intelligent home, you are left wondering how to make sense of it all.
“We used to talk about computers being complicated. Now we’re talking about a whole new range of products. It’s mind-boggling,” says veteran tech consultant Gary Arlen, the president of Arlen Communications.
While there’s a degree of cooperation, big tech’s usual suspects — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung — all want to protect and expand their sphere of influence: to compile data on everything there is to know about you and ultimately to make gazillions selling you more things. That’s partly why some of the people I talk to haven’t been persuaded yet to buy a connected washer, air conditioner or even smart bulbs.
“Each have their own business models and reasons to do what they’re doing. It’s not in their best interests to help their competitors be successful,” says Tim Bajarin, president of Creative Strategies.
“Our message to the market is that there is more complexity than necessarily is needed. We’re working to take complexity out of the process,” said Tim Baxter, the president and CEO of Samsung Electronics North America.