A decade On Are We any closer to the integrated smart Home?
10 years ago this week I wrote this post on an imagined ‘X’ protocol that brought disparate systems together in a smart home utopia. however the last paragraph brought a discouraging conclusion to the piece…
After 10 years of writing about the “smart” home, isn’t it time the hardware makers and software companies got together and sorted this whole integration standards thing out? We’re a lot more than a decade into the widespread use of the internet. IP is the standard. Wifi is built into everything from watches to games consoles. There’s a lot more computing power in my phone that on the Apollo rocket that first arrived on the moon. definitely it’s not beyond the capability of man in the 21st century to sort out this mess. Isn’t it time your washing maker could talk “X”.
It’s doubly discouraging when you realise that another 10 years have passed and we’re still in the same nightmare. despite dozens of new standards and attempts at a unifying protocol it seems we’re still no closer to making ‘X’ a reality.
Positives?
Are there any positives in any way we can take from recent advances in home tech? This part of my original post stuck out to me on re-reading last night…
Sonos and others will launch their X enabled firmware. unexpectedly your house has a voice.
The recent launch of the Sonos One with it’s built in smart assistant maybe hints at where ‘X’ may be coming from. Is it already here, quietly adding a lot more and a lot more capabilities each day?
The Cloud Controller
This takes me to the post I wrote in 2015 – Will The Cloud be the Integrator in the sky to save home Automation? This time I concluded with the following…
In the end individuals will decide if the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, if the added comfort compensates for the privacy and safety concerns, if home Automation ever gets to reach its true potential or remains a sideshow. Whether you think it’s a good idea or not, if I was a betting man I’d put my house on the future of home automation moving to the Cloud.
That post was pretty controversial, as you can tell from the comments below it. but I think it’s looking a lot more and a lot more accurate each day that passes.
I’m not saying an Alexa, Google Assistant, IFTTT, smart home will be the best you can have, but with the resolute refusal from the industry to tackle its integration problem, I’m convinced it’s the one the masses will adopt.
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