How far are we from "smart home"?

"Smart home" is one of the hottest areas in the technology industry in recent years, and the follow-up of major technology manufacturers has made it attract more attention. However, for most consumers, the so-called "smart home" seems to be a long way off, and many smart home devices are in a state of slow sales due to shortcomings in functions and experience.

Stacey Higginbotham, a well-known contributor to the American technology blog GigaOM, recently published an article analyzing the development prospects and current problems of smart homes. The following is the main content of the article.

Nowadays, most people are not interested in smart homes. Data from market research firm Parks Associates shows that currently only 13% of households own Internet devices that are not computers, mobile phones or tablets. This shows that smart homes are still a long way from being available to mass consumers.

Last week I had a meeting with the Internet of Things standards team of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) on the topic of "how to get consumers to adapt to smart homes" and subsequently gained some basic mature ideas.

Why are smart homes so far lacking? Before I spent $300 on Philips Hue smart lights for my living room, I had to consider why I needed them. Fortunately, I'm familiar with tools like IFTTT (If This Then That), so I can see how connecting my home's lighting system to web services could be a big help, like alerting me to stock movements, contacting my editor, and locating my husband.

However, compared to the Wi-Fi networks that people are already quite dependent on, there is almost no dependence on smart homes, so the most urgent problem to be solved is how to make people truly accept these IoT devices and make people have the urge to automate their homes.

In my opinion, there are currently three obstacles: product marketing, price, and people's concerns about personal privacy.

Why do we need a smart home?

For marketers of smart home devices, although they describe to us a series of beautiful prospects, such as children being able to get corresponding information as soon as they step into the house after school, and smart home devices being able to enter standby mode when family members wake up in the morning, etc., consumers are often not sure about these seemingly attractive prospects, so marketers should start from the most basic needs of consumers.

We need to clarify the concept of "smart home". Is it fully automatic? Is it fun? Is it energy-saving? No one knows what conveniences smart home can bring to them, or why they need smart home, which is also the most asked question by many consumers in the emails they sent to me.

The above situation and marketing dilemma actually involve two other problems: smart homes are shared and complex. Both of these problems require people to have a new understanding of smart home devices, so that they can understand how much these devices can change their daily lives after being connected to each other compared to current technology products. For example, the current technology industry has done a very successful job in marketing computers and mobile phones, turning them into private devices owned by most people, but for smart homes, it is obviously far from this state.

So from a marketing perspective, it's hard to figure out how to sell a highly personal yet shareable device. Imagine if your smart devices were all triggered by a phone or app. That would be a problem for guests, kids, or the whole family, because some people use Android phones and others use iPhones , so it's hard to unify.

The Development of Home Hub

When talking about the complexity of smart homes, let's start with a basic premise. Currently, the super detailed programming solutions provided by most home hub manufacturers have not been recognized by consumers. The application logic of smart home devices set by manufacturers is often out of touch with the actual usage environment. The former is mostly rigid, while the latter is more flexible, so it is easy for consumers to lose interest in smart homes.

Another problem is that people usually don’t just buy a whole set of smart home devices, but buy several devices that they really need. Usually, these devices need to be connected to the cloud to work properly, which naturally causes certain impacts to device manufacturers, such as additional cost investment and the possibility that the device may crash when the network is disconnected or the API is blocked.

Nowadays, Hub has become the main solution for smart home. They usually have powerful enough computing power, support Wi-Fi network and continue to work when power is off, etc. However, this still requires consumers to be able to configure and manage these devices with an engineer-like mindset. But in fact, this is not reasonable. We cannot let consumers figure out their real needs after multiple attempts like engineers do. Instead, we should be able to meet their actual needs from the beginning, so that smart home devices can be quickly integrated into their lives and play an important role.

Let's connect with each other

There are two solutions at present. Either add learning algorithms to the devices, or use communication protocols or frameworks such as AllJoyn or Open Intercommunication Consortium to establish connections between devices. Using these technologies, the user's device can obtain relevant information from the surrounding environment and then pass the user's needs to any connected device. Unfortunately, at present, these learning algorithms are very slow, and Nest is the most typical example.

AllJoyn and other similar IoT frameworks (such as IBM 's open source IoT framework Adept, which uses blockchain, Telehash and BitTorrent) are very interesting, but they will only be truly valuable if they are widely adopted. If they are not done well, these technologies will become another DLNA, which sounds like a "panacea" to solve audio and video compatibility and enable personal PCs, consumer appliances and mobile devices to achieve interconnection, but in the end it is a lot of thunder and little rain.

Product Club, a startup founded by former Yahoo executive Tom Coates, has launched a solution that ensures that these devices are connected to each other and perform their respective functions. The "home device chat room" service he envisions allows users to log in to a virtual chat room and see how each smart home device "thinks" and "makes decisions." This is an interesting proposal, but it requires a higher level of artificial intelligence technology to eventually become a reality. Imagine that a user has to catch a flight the next morning. He logs into this virtual chat room in the evening and is sure that his smart butler can arrange everything for him so that he can catch the plane as soon as he gets up. What a pleasant thing it is.

A smart home should allow users to see everything that is happening in the home and influence the decisions made by those devices, rather than writing programs for each device to operate.

Smart homes are too expensive!

Replacing smart home devices is very expensive, and new products can cost five times or more than old ones. For example, the Nest smart thermostat costs $250, while the Honeywell smart thermostat I used in my home previously cost $70. The upcoming August smart door lock costs $250, while the current Kwikset smart lock on the market costs $30.

Most people don’t believe in high technology, especially given the marketing issues discussed above. There are certainly ways to address the high cost of smart home devices. One way is to highlight the performance of the device. Again, Nest is a good example.

I was at a dinner party at the home of a friend who is a CEO of a non-tech company. I noticed she had a Nest thermostat on her wall and asked her about it. She told me she loved it and had a lot of fun playing with it. In fact, she came home early to lower the temperature in time for a dinner party that evening. She didn't mind because she loved playing with it.

She came home early to turn down her Nest thermostat. She drove home just to turn up the temperature in her home, which she could have controlled from her phone. She’s not a dumb woman, but she apparently didn’t realize that the Nest thermostat had remote access. She didn’t realize it existed. The Nest thermostat is a beautiful addition to her home, and she values ​​its learning capabilities.

These learning capabilities are another reason to ignore the cost of smart home devices. It changes your perspective: Nest is not a thermostat, it is a thermostat that learns. Remote access is not a highly marketable feature, and it is clear that you pay more for these devices to have learning capabilities.

It's a similar story with the August smart door lock. Jason Johnson, the company's CEO, will tell you it's not a lock, it's a robot. This robot can follow your instructions to let certain people into your house, even when you're not home. Is that why the lock is worth $250? I don't know.

But the cost of smart home devices will come down. We are in the early stages of a transformation in the production of consumer products, and as demand increases, the cost of Wi-Fi modules and microcontrollers will gradually fall. Moore's Law will prove it.

More worries

The final worry about smart homes is that a virus could hack into your light bulbs or access the camera footage you have connected to Google's servers. Many methods and measures have been proposed to address this.

But I think consumers will have to play a role themselves, by updating their passwords, patching their systems, and staying informed of potential problems. Device manufacturers will have to do the same and go a step further, by keeping users informed of security updates and continually testing for security vulnerabilities. When a device is connected to the internet, it is exposed to the possibility of being compromised from the moment it is shipped.

Governments also have a role to play. On security, government regulators should penalize companies that repeatedly have problems or fail to update their software in a timely manner. On privacy, government regulators should set rules for metadata, not just to prevent companies from disclosing personally identifiable information. We also need to prohibit unreasonable searches and seizures of digital devices as part of civil rights.

Bottom Line

As you can see, the solution to these problems isn't simply to tell consumers they can get a connected experience for five times the cost of a regular device. A salesperson at Savant, a high-end home automation vendor, once told me that in the next few years, people will accept smart home devices as they accepted indoor plumbing. Granted, this guy was selling smart toilets, but I think he had a point.

The key to getting consumers to buy smart home devices is to address their security and privacy issues, while also making consumers understand the cost and functionality of the devices.

We need to address the legal, design, engineering, and communications aspects of smart home devices, and then work our way back to the services and products themselves so that consumers can use them without worry. After all, we humans create tools to adapt to them, not just to adapt to us.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.