Ask HN: Why is the state of “smart home” devices still so dire?
Is there no company smaller than Google or Amazon or Apple willing or able to make a better smart home device? Especially now with AI solving the language-proficiency problem in talking to these devices, it seems like the rest of the product is just API integrations with a few hundred smart home hardware vendors, and some easy lookups like weather and calendar.
Is there something I'm missing about why the current generation of these still suck so bad? As a weekend project I bolted speech-synthesis and speech-recognition to ChatGPT (and have seen similar "Show HN" posts) and immediately had a more interesting conversational partner than Alexa or, god help them, Siri has ever been.
Why are three of the most profitable technology companies in the history of mankind unable to come up with better than Google Home, Alexa, and Siri? Is there some unusual challenge here that I fail to understand?
Plenty of people I know would spend $500-1000 (not to mention the lightbulbs, appliances, or various “smart” gadgets) on just the smart home “brain” itself, and not even for something HN folks might consider “ideal” (privacy respecting, no ads etc), but just for a device that actually, usefully, and consistently does most of the things these devices purport to do. Why can’t three different trillion-dollar companies even manage that, and more to the point, why aren’t there more billion-dollar companies even trying?
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadBecause none of those companies are in the business of providing a useful service to end users. Google sells ads, Amazon sells marketplaces, Apple sells consumer entertainment system. None of them went into the smart home business to address the needs or solve the problems of people using the devices. They all intended to use the devices to expand their cores business and make it more profitable.
You can mimic one with a lot of work via HomeAssistant and some programming; the secret is you can create virtual switches that you can then use Siri to turn on or off to trigger activities.
As I've pointed out before, home IoT ought to include duct damper controls, vents and fans to the outside, and sensors which measure temperature, humidity, CO2, and maybe other pollutants, both inside and outside the house. Then they can use outside air when appropriate. You can buy all that. It's common in commercial building control. Honeywell and Johnson Controls, old-line building control vendors, sell this stuff. It requires some engineering for each building. That's why it's rarely seen in homes.
Some years ago I went to an IoT meeting in the Dogpatch area of San Francisco. The meeting was in a big room on the waterfront, in a refurbished industrial space. The room had skylights with glass vents that could be opened and windows onto the Bay that could be opened. Both were controlled by a manual endless chain, which could have been motorized without too much trouble. There were ceiling fans, and a standard dumb HVAC system. None of this stuff was interconnected. With a big group in there, it should have sensed rising CO2, opened some of the windows, cranked up the fans, and run the room without active HVAC until sunset. Then it should have gradually closed the windows as the room cooled, kept the ceiling fans turning over, and added some heat. Once everyone left, it should have briefly ventilated the room thoroughly, then closed up everything, stopped the fans, and let the room cool down to 60F or so while unoccupied. But no.
That's building automation.
Hotels go for this stuff, because they have big energy costs and a huge range of occupancy, especially in function rooms.
True automation has to be designed in, and it costs money.
For example, the master bedroom should have four-way light switches [1] such that the lights in the room can be turned off by the switch next to the door, the switch next to the bathroom, and a switch on either side of the bed.
Even a "home theater setup" switch can be created by some intelligent lighting choices (turn off main lights but turn on "audience lights" which triggers the screen to drop down, projector to come on, etc).
[1] Once at 4-way, you can go to N-way by chaining as many as you want: https://matthews.sites.wfu.edu/courses/p230/switches/Switche...
I think the best switch of all is going to be to anticipate the user’s needs and adjust the house to them. It’ll likely be in a range of subtlety between closing the blinds for you when you’re about to walk through your living room naked and giving you a light show if you put dance music on. The reason you probably won’t ever see it is because not everyone wants the same things and it’s difficult to intuit what anyone wants without being told. You have to solve some pretty big social problems with technology to make it seamless for normal people.
The most sensible approach might be to somehow clone your consciousness into a machine and let the machine control your house. This would probably make a great Black Mirror episode.
Perhaps you might be viewing smart homes in too narrow of a view to recognize how wide spread it is.
[1] https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-s...
Again, the question comes down to whether or not the residents are the market.
> People expect more from their homes
That sounds like housing industry hype. People want an affordable, safe, secure home. They don't necessarily want or even need to check the status of their HVAC over the internet while on vacation in Maui.
I deal with a lot of small to large farm | market garden | light business queries and many people are interested in fully digitally metred water (scheme + bore) | power | gas usage with fine control on reticulation, powered machines, furnaces, etc.
There's less interest in voice controlled automation and far more in fully logged + spreadsheeted resource usage and scheduled operation patterns.
There's keen interest in early notification of failures, leaks, spikes, etc.
This overlaps "home" in the sense that many of these queries are coming from people that live where they want these systems.
Then there's the likes of Ikea, also with their own line of smart home devices doing just fine as well.
So you’ve never seen anybody write code on a Mac?
Macs are barely more of a revenue generator than wearables and accessories, which is stuff like Apple Watch, iPod, Apple TV, Beats Electronics and Apple-branded and third-party accessories. Services is iTunes Store, the App Store, the Mac App Store, the iBooks Store, AppleCare, Apple Pay, licensing and other services. Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re...
Apple is an entertainment device company that happens to also sell the development platform for iOS, and that platform can also be used for other kinds of development, the kind that supports the backend. A good thing, too, because Apple's cloud services and data centers use Linux and a lot of other non-Mac things necessary for Apple's services to generate revenue.
I suppose it would be possible to use one voice assistant at "home" for the smart-home stuff and another for the phone, but the hassle for most people is too much.
The Free Market Fairy is a myth. On the flipside, maybe the free market has already had its say and given the idea thumbs down.
Like, building to a profitable SMB then exiting is essentially what this site (ycombinator) is all about.
The local cafe is now a Starbucks, your bank is now part of JPM, your favorite utility software just got acquired and killed because there’s no way to show you ads on it.
I wish there was a simple document listing all the commands Siri knows, but you can't find one.
My kids and I constantly make fun of it, yell at it in exasperation, or give up and do a task manually on the phone.
The big speaker still sounds nice though.
The last one is really rare now, because I grouped them together in the Hue app first.
Hey siri play the best by Tina turner
Now playing the best of by some random band you’ve never heard of in a genre you’ve never played
I don't know how I do it but asking Siri to play Mexican Radio [1] works about 50% of the time, but the exact same sequence of words often just gets a Mexican radio station heh.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUjbOcO_hT0
That reminds me of Siri on my tablet the other day. The prompt wouldn’t go away. Firstly, why doesn’t it have a timeout??
I was using the display for CCTV and didn’t want a Siri overlay.
I tried “hey siri, cancel”, “hey siri, I don’t need anything”, “hey siri, what is 2 plus 2” (thinking it hadn’t detected an end state) etc.
Then I googled it. Turns out you have to be semi rude: “hey siri, go away”.
I was sick at the time and I had zero patience and I swear to god I nearly smashed the thing.
If you want to use non-HomeKit items, you can use a RaspberryPi and run HomeBridge. Or you can just stick to HomeKit items (which are unfortunately more expensive and limited in selection).
I see you’re mostly unsatisfied with voice controls, but Siri is pretty good with HoneKit controls. Or you could just use your phone.
Google Home has its share of issues, but Assistant and Siri don’t exist in the same universe. Siri is just kinda sad tbh.
This article is paywalled, but put to rest the “why is Siri so bad still?” question for me. [1]
One of the details reported I found most compelling was that internal dissatisfaction w Siri’s ability is so great that the headset team seriously considered using an entirely new / different voice system for its product.
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-siri-chief-st...
If you want something that's not cloud based you can get it, but I think it costs more than that. I haven't gotten quotes myself, but per here it's in the thousands (tens of thousands if you go wired): https://www.electronichouse.com/home-lighting/weighing-wired...
Business-model-wise it's probably either that "pay $$$$ up front" or "pay a subscription" and how many people would really pay a subscription vs just using the Google/Amazon/Apple systems?
The whole IoT era is plagued by draconian old-world corporate power-control games, which are unrefined crudity compared to where PCs had been headed. Some healthy standards & protocols that actually leave users in power would start to cleanup the toxic waste dump operating-regime these products are in now.
It's unclear to me, though, how pervasively it will be adopted. The incentives in the IoT ecosystem are really hard to align in a way that creates great experiences for customers.
(I work tangentially on IoT at Google, but speak for myself.)
Agreed. I recently moved into a new house. The builder put in a "clare smart home system." This included a clare home display mounted in the hallway with an inward facing camera. This device is exclusively controlled by security/smart home companies that contract with clare. I have no option to disable the camera, disable the phoning home, etc. In fact, before I can do anything meaningful on the device, they required an in-home appointment where they would set up every smart device in the house for "free," but future additions would require a paid service call for them to come out and set them up.
I had emailed them asking about whether there was an alarm system, and before I got any reply I found an option on the display to activate the alarm. Which I did. But before it actually activated (it gave some sort of countdown), I pressed Cancel. It prompted me for a PIN, which I could only get from the installers. I had no option to cancel the alarm other than to cut power to the device, but once I pulled it off the wall it started wailing a tamper alarm that wouldn't stop until I pulled the backup battery. Oh and I found out later that it was snapping photos of me against my will and without my permission. Please note this all happened before the in-home appointment (which never happened).
I canceled the appointment, permanently tore the thing off the wall, and it's destined for a landfill because the only way to get it to work is to activate it through that alarm company. Oh and they won't even return my calls/emails after I canceled the appointment. I tried calling them to see if they wanted it so they could use it as a warranty replacement or something, instead of putting it in the garbage.
Every "smart" thing they put in this house sucks. The Ring doorbell doesn't function as a doorbell if it loses wifi connection. Oh and when it's connected, the initial press does ring the doorbell, but subsequent presses don't ring the doorbell, and this is by design. During the brief time I had it connected, I was getting constant alerts of suspicious people in my neighborhood, with attached photos of black people walking on a sidewalk. what!? It turns out it didn't recognize my address so connected me to some default place in Texas (I live in Washington!). There was no way to manually select a location, so I guess I was going to get false, racist alerts until such time as Ring decided to recognize my address. I reset it and canceled my Ring account. I'm going to replace it with a normal door bell button. This is getting thrown in the garbage as well.
The "smart" z-wave switches haven't been connected/activated so should function as normal switches right? Nope, they do this stupid dim/undim thing and periodically completely fail to work until I turn off/on the circuit breaker. Another 5 items destined for a landfill to be replaced by regular switches.
The smart front door lock (keypad) and smart garage door openers have never been connected to anything and I'm going to leave them that way. I really wish there was a hardware kill switch that would disable all wireless connections and leave them in a dumb mode. I'm worried someone else can come in and connect their phone or something, since I've never set them up.
(in case anyone wants a free clare home panel, PM me an address to mail it to and I'll send it; rather have someone tinker with or hack it than trash it)
The Ring doorbell absolutely works as a mechanical doorbell if it's hard-wired into the doorbell system in the house...if there is one.
Other than that, totally agree with you re: built-in "smart home" systems. They are cheap systems builders use to drive the home price up that you don't have much control over.
If we build our own house, I'll ask for non-smart devices but replace them with my own. I LOVE our smart home stuff.
When the ring doorbell lost wifi, because we changed ISPs, it no longer functioned as a doorbell. When pressed, it would only make the chime outside at the button, it would not ring inside the house. Yes it's hard wired to a doorbell inside the house.
When connected to wifi and active, when the ring doorbell button is pressed, it will ring inside the house one single time. Then it starts recording, by default for 2 minutes. During the time it's recording, if the button is pressed again, the button press is completely ignored. So by default you can ring the doorbell 1 time every 2 minutes -- anything more often gets ignored. There is a huge bug report / thread about this on ring's site and they just say it's by design.
When the ring doorbell is completely disconnected from wifi and reset back to factory settings, it indeed functions as a regular doorbell. But it also has a spinning light that notifies everybody that it's not set up and is not recording.
My brother in law works for a home builder that installs Ring doorbell buttons by default on all their homes. He said he noticed that about half of them get replaced with a regular doorbell button or a different "smart/camera" doorbell within a few weeks of initial move-in.
Like many vague complaints ostensibly concerning technology, this is a political issue and the solutions will remain fleeting and/or unidentified until the issue is acknowledged and discussed as such.
The extremely rich, or hospitality corps have the benefit of hiring a specialist MSP for all of this, that can wrestle all the disparate pieces together, with the financial muscle to get what support they need from their OEMs.
You know what makes industrial automation a pain in the ass in mid-sized businesses? People wanting the benefits of automation without the burden of fully quantifying the process to be automated.
This is the problem with 'automation' in the home. You need someone who can quantify the 'home process' and figure out what routines can be delegated to the automation in order to provide a tangible benefit. Some changes may need to made to human behavior for the automation to be beneficial. Which changes are acceptable, which not etc. This is hard enough to do in industry and expecting it in every home seems... optimistic. Until this gets sorted out, I don't expect to see anything other than the continuation of the 1950's 'labor saving appliance' revolution coupled with invasive home entertainment systems and the next wave of 'clap on, clap off' lights.
By compare, I feel like you are preaching a delivered from on high careful slow growth, where every home needs weeks of consultants to come in & carefully outline the next 20 years of use cases & then carefully select & hardcode exacting picks for that home.
Open source is already kicking ass. Home Assistant is the shit. We just need an ecosystem of devices that are even 1/2 as user-exposed as the software doing the driving is. We need to fuel what is possible with devices that are willing to meet us in finding out. Not more stodgy slow encumbered methodical processes.
Standard home tasks that take up the majority of time in my experience are (time quantity decreasing) cleaning, re-organization/shelving, cooking, laundry and managing maintenance. Flipping switches and queuing entertainment items are negligible.
I have yet to see a 'smart home' system that changes this calculus (aside from the humble robot vacuum) and even then, I see very few people that are able to keep spaces uncluttered enough between 0 and 4 inches above the floor for a robot vacuum to actually do a better job than the human with a vacuum in any reasonable amount of time.
I agree we don't need in-home consultants or a monolithic bureaucracy. I just don't think people are ready to hyper-optimize their existence enough for automation to be truly game-changing in the home. Maybe without kids or a partner, but definitely not with.
It allows different brands of smart devices to talk to each other without having to buy the smarthub for each brand separately.
"Matter products run locally and do not rely on an internet connection"
1. Requiring an always-on connection to the Internet, regardless of whether a local wifi peer network would suffice.
2. Requiring a proprietary hub in the cloud that serves as a bidirectional relay. Extra points if you can charge a monthly fee for this service.
3. Requiring anytime remote firmware updates that the user cannot veto.
All these things enable the HA company to snoop everything that goes on in your house and sell this data to advertisers. They make a lot more money from this than from the sale of the devices.
And that's why I only build my own HA devices.
There's lots to be had in the local polling / local push categories in https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/
I haven't found very many smart things in practice that force you into internet connectivity.
That's cool. My kid is a budding (pre-tween) engineer, and I have technical/scientific skills but no engineering skills. Have you made anything like super entry-level that might be a project for a couple of no-knowledge-yet enthusiasts? (I just considered for the first time ever that this might be a good starting point for my kid's "real" engineering work. So far it's been kits and toy-things.)
If you want something more useful you could look at incorporating sensors like a thermometer, light sensor, soil moisture sensor, magnetic door sensor, etc and using the sensor data to set up automations in the HA GUI. Maybe something like "activate water pump when soil moisture sensor goes below _____" (you could get the parts to do this for maybe $20-$30 on Adafruit, or cheaper from Aliexpress vendors with super slow shipping).
To take things a step up from there, I built an Airgradient kit a month or two and really enjoyed it. Requires some soldering knowledge, but nothing you can't learn while doing (just start out by soldering the cheap parts in case of oopsies). You can even have your kid try to modify their PCB designs (nothing crazy, maybe just put their name on it)
That opens up an insane amount of smart-home devices that require no internet connection at all.
They say the "S" in IoT stands for "security". I'd be overjoyed if there is an IoT company that updates their stuff consistently. Not bloody likely when it comes to consumer goods, though, and definitely not without some sort of subscription.
Never again.
There's just no market. It looked snazzy when it was coming out, there was good hype, and then people actually experienced them. It's just not that cool and less useful than a clapper.
2. OpenAI's APIs are expensive, and building an alternative datacenter for running the open-source LLMs at scale is even more expensive (and probably not allowed under their licensing). And even bigco private LLMs like Bard are presumably pretty expensive for their creators to run. So, "the AI is free" model of Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant doesn't easily port itself to the newer tech.
3. If you try to avoid that by running the models locally... Getting reasonable performance requires expensive hardware, so something like a $49 Google Home Mini is out of the question for now.
I think it's super likely that at some point, the current generation of home assistants are gonna get walloped by the better AIs we've seen developed. It just hasn't happened yet; someone needs to a) do it, and b) figure out the pricing model — either offer enough value that subscriptions become worth it vs worse-but-free alternatives, or sell some kind of larger-use-case at-home-AI box running local models that can also do home assistant stuff.
Or just wait for the cost of running the models to come down, at which point you can just 1:1 port the current experience over, except you end up with much smarter assistants.
And then you realize transitioning the response to an LLM would make the device even more expensive and the business makes no sense at all.
just because amazon has billions of dollars to acquire user data, or acquire and kill smaller companies, it doesn't mean it's the best or only way.
Door & window sensors, temp/humidity sensor, lock are 'endpoints' and use low power, light bulbs & strips, switches act as mesh nodes.
Highly responsive and seems reliable. I use Apple gear.
ZigBee just seems way too unreliable. WiFi devices have - for me at least - been rock solid in terms of reliability, while ZigBee stuff randomly disappears or needs to be relinked all the time (and it is hard to debug when this happens, unlike just pinging an IP on your LAN)
Home assistant et al are typically overkill and another point of unreliability. Just run Mosquitto (MQTT broker) locally and run a local NodeRed instance if you need anything sophisticated in terms of logic.
Since you are using MQTT it is trivial to write your own app for controlling everything from your phone. Use tailscale if you need to do things when off-LAN.
That said, I do have a hybrid solution: HomeKit for having a nice UI, Node-RED for a little custom logic, and a Homebridge MQTT plugin to tie it all together.
HomeKit is perhaps unique in that the Home app will work just fine without an Internet connection (although you do gain the benefit of remote control if you have an Apple TV or HomePod). Siri is pants, obviously, but good enough to set scenes.
That said, MQTT over WiFi is easy to troubleshoot and won't lock you in to any software or changing rest APIs.
Would something like Kafka be workable in this space?
Many people see large corporations and because we’re the “21st century” believe that everything that is made should be the best or is somehow the most advanced thing and therefore should be far superior. Unfortunately that couldn’t be farther from the truth in many ways.
Items made are often times just pushed out there because they want to be the first at a growing market, without really really caring what the best for the consumer is. They want wants best for their pocketbooks, what turns a profit and positions them as the leader in the minds of the masses. Security is usually an afterthought. Actual need and what’s best for humanity is even further down in that list.
Feeding big data machines will never be what’s best for individuals needs
It's definitely doable and I still have my own custom assistants in the house. However, I had to get around with a Snowboy model for hotword detection (and Snowboy is now basically abandoned), Mozilla DeepSpeech model for speech-to-text (and that's quite heavy), and Mycroft's mimic3 text-to-speech model (and Mycroft is now basically bankrupt). Then writing the integration is relatively easy - I used Platypush, but it can definitely be done with Home Assistant and OpenHAB too.
Compared to 3-4 years ago, I think we're now in a state where the content is no longer the issue (just plug into a LLM, and all of your text requests will get an answer), nor integrations are a problem (just write a Platypush event hook on speech detected, and you can connect it to everything, no need for "Works with Google/Alexa" labels). Text-to-speech synthesis has also become cheap and ubiquitous.
But the hotword detection and speech-to-text models are still IMHO the bottleneck. Hotword detection is a field where you need a very small and lightweight model that only detects a specific word or phrase in a very reliable way. Snowboy was an amazing FOSS project - which also came with this cool idea of "crowd-funded models", where in order to download a model for a certain hotword you were first supposed to provide three audio tracks where you say that word in order to improve the model. But it's now discontinued because it cost the volunteers too much to run the infra.
And Mozilla DeepSpeech is a relatively good choice for general-purpose speech-to-text, but it's heavy (it takes 100% of the CPU when it runs on a Raspberry Pi) and it's mostly optimized for English - even support for other Western languages is patchy.
If there are other open-source alternatives that solve these problems, I'd be very happy to learn about them. Once these blockers are removed, there should be really no reason for anyone to feed their audio streams to Google or Amazon.
snips.ai is acquired by sonos. google and sonos are still in patent wars. i'm not sure whether sonos will survive. it's not easy if big tech lawyers come after you, even you are kinda big. mycroft was a part of patent war too and the poor guy dedicated all of his energy instead of trying to build something. https://mycroft.ai/blog/huge-win-for-mycroft-at-the-patent-t...
spokestack.io is no longer active. stability ai will probably go bankruptcy or aws or nvidia will acquire them: https://futurism.com/the-byte/stable-diffusion-stability-ai-...
picovoice.ai tries to do things differently, combining on-device speech processing and subscription based model. it's the only company i know that has good hotword detection and speech-to-text. their free option is enough for my project https://picovoice.ai/pricing/
you may ask why nobody uses their tech to build an alternative voice assistant. again i dont think smart speakers are profitable enough. when you can buy an echo for $20 it's hard to find somebody to pay $20 per month. silicon shortage and logistics costs increased the boms. it's not easy to compete with amazon which can burn $10 billion.
openai api probably feeds their audio streams to microsoft. otherwise why would nuance move to the cloud when they can process on-device, right after microsoft acquires them. to find options not feeding big tech, we gotta start paying for non-big tech.
I need a smart home where the built-in devices communicate and change behaviour based on sensor input and a controller where I'm in control of the software and open standards are being used. This also means that everything should work without internet access. Needing internet to turn a light on is pretty stupid. I'm thinking of you IKEA.
I'm not going to waste my money on any smart devices before this happens.
To make money you need to keep selling devices and that is hard. Having someone first pay for devices and then monthly fee is much more profitable. This model applies to many industries.
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