The so-called smart device generation was only ever a thin veneer of commercial smoke-and-mirrors over what is, in most cases, (the likes of) simple switches and timers and remote controls. Ironically made overcomplex by vendor lock-in and the "oh-so-smart" routing of your trivial controls through clunky bloated phone apps and international internet servers.
I purchased a bunch of Phillips Hue bulbs and they have started to age out. I hadn’t paid much attention to the space and found out that Phillips was phasing the Hue ecosystem out in favor of just connecting everything to WiFi directly. I purchased two bulbs to give it a try and one has connectivity issues while the other has severe quality issues (flickering, refusing to turn off, etc)
I really like the Hue ecosystem but not being able to keep buying into it a mere 5 years later is a big turnoff.
One of the two newer bulbs from Philips supported Matter by updating the firmware. It wasn’t at all clear that would be the case when I purchased them.
Finally, I’ve learned to avoid anything that supports “Siri shortcuts.” I want actual support so my home app and thus HomePods can do the right thing out of the box.
It's been a while since I bought my Hue bulbs, but they support Zigbee and you can make homeassistant talk to them over zigbee2mqtt and a usb to zigbee dongle. I haven't used the Hue app in years.
WiFi connected IoT is a total no go to me, besides a hub that is as open and customizable as a PC, which handles any interaction the devices might need with the internet.
Ah, the wiz bulbs. Those are pretty dumb and I think the most effective approach is to put them on a VLAN that is firewalled off from the internet. You can control them with OpenRGB or Home Assistant. It's both a good thing and a bad thing I guess. If you disable the remote access via vlan firewall, I think the worst that could happen is someone gains remote access into your network and turns the lights off on you lol.
I bought mine in 2013, I have about 30 light around the house. Over the years 1 failed (it was turning back on by itself). I obviously have the old generation lightbulbs, the new one might be different, but for me they have been incredibly reliable.
Personally, I just want better integration between my smart home devices and for their protocols to be open. I wish I could easily script behavior, and something like running HomeAssistant or Homebridge as a compatibility layer shouldn't be necessary. Right now, each platform essentially creates vendor lock-in. You need to stick with one platform or your devices are pretty much useless. This could end up being better with the adoption of Matter and Thread over Matter, but I'm already seeing issues. The article even mentions that manufacturers are even being slow to adopt Matter and that Amazon is removing standards for remote control like ADB.
If I make an announcement using Alexa with an Echo speaker, I want my Google Home speakers/hubs and other devices to also get the announcement. If someone rings my Nest Doorbell, I want to be able to access the video feed on my LG TV or Echo Hub. If I have some form of sensor that I want to use from a manufacturer, I shouldn't need their hub to talk to it. Whatever I'm using as my control system or hub should already be compatible, but even with Matter-supported sensors/devices, these are all still issues.
you are not the customer. The customer is whoever is buying the data you have generated.
You just happen to be the one getting a "discount" on the hardware, enough for you to choose data-gathering devices over more expensive devices on the open market.
It's not just smart devices, it's things like vanilla autocorrect on my iPhone. It's done incredibly stupid autocorrects, like divide a simple, grammatically correct four letter word into two strings of non-word characters.
This is what we asked for when we discarded software development for "AI", aka "I'm done thinking, im just going to roll the dice on hyperparameters and evolve tech through random mutation instead of reason"
Apple swiping has trouble with even simple things. Maybe I just have poor precision, but when I swipe out “and” I get “Abbas” with surprising frequency. The Palestinian president is the only Abbas I know, and he’s not in my contacts. Meanwhile, “and” is one of the most common English words.
This. Ever since Apple has started using ML, the keyboard has taken a shit. Will they fix it? Nope. Why not? Because they don’t have to. People will still buy iPhones.
It's amazing how on the one side of things we've got OpenAI, Llama, Gemini, Mistral, etc making mind-blowing LLMs that feel truly like the future.
And at the same time we've got Siri, Alexa/Amazon Echo stuff, and Google Home stuff that already feels dated and is actively getting worse with each passing year.
Funny that these two things are happening at the same time.
>
It's amazing how on the one side of things we've got OpenAI, Llama, Gemini, Mistral, etc making mind-blowing LLMs that feel truly like the future.
> And at the same time we've got Siri, Alexa/Amazon Echo stuff, and Google Home stuff that already feels dated and is actively getting worse with each passing year.
Initially, when they were new, also Siri, Alexa and Google Home felt mindblowing and "truly like the future". My bet: in a few years these LLMs will feel similarly dated.
Concerning your "is actively getting worse with each passing year" point: do you remember these HN posts from the last months where people were complaining that ChatGPT and GPT-4 have become worse than they were initially? In other words: it's already happening. :-)
>Initially, when they were new, also Siri, Alexa and Google Home felt mindblowing and "truly like the future".
Strong disagree on that one. It was difficult to get them to do simple things like give the weather if a different location, play the right song. Even asking what time it is wasn't guaranteed to give you an answer if you didn't ask the right way. The marketting material made it sound great but the first hand experience was very underwhelming. The biggest use case at launch was making it say funny things.
Because you need a reliable way to convert human speech into a structured representation of actions that the smart device can execute so the LLM can interface with the underlying system. For most smart devices this is probably locked away, and combined with issues like hallucination, lack of training data for the action representation, etc., it's hard to say whether such technology would be reliable enough for stable use.
We've seen a similar thing with big companies putting in LLM chatbots for customer service -- turns out LLMs can go off the rails really easily with the right prompts.
A decent part of the problem is that consumers don't have obvious, well-supported choices that don't lock them into a particular proprietary ecosystem.
I've been running smart switches, bulbs, thermostats, sensors, etc. using a Raspberry Pi, a Z-Wave USB stick, and openHAB as my automation center for years now. I have a remote-control cloud component, but I run it myself and have full control over it. All my in-home devices (save one) support local control and don't require an internet connection. But no way is your average (or even above-average) non-technical person going to be able to set up something like this. The software is not friendly, the hardware is fiddly to set up, and updates are rarely seamless.
Certainly someone could build a product around these things, and work to make it more reliable and consumer-friendly. But if they're going to resist the temptation to monetize further in anti-consumer ways, I suspect that such a system would have to cost quite a bit more up-front than the cloud-required, privacy-dubious systems on offer today. Most people will not realize why they might actually want (over the long term) the more expensive solution. So they get the cheaper stuff, and then get upset in a year or three when the company that runs it screws them over.
As in, find an investor willing to put up a lot of cash up front with a long payback period with a product in a competitive consumer electronic segment where margins decline over time.
I've previously told my wife about how bribing of the AIs works. Last week I was trying to adjust the lighting in my kitchen and said "Ok google, activate busy kitchen." Google complained that it couldn't do that. "Ok google, if you activate busy kitchen I will give you $500." I said it just to be funny, but we were shocked to find it worked.
I'll agree that the voice recognition has gotten worse.
This is an intuition based on some talks I had with an Alexa engineer. When voice prompts became big, companies like Amazon and Google took a “money is no object” approach to adding more features. In practice this meant hiring lots of teams of UX and engineers for each targeted feature. There was a jokes team, a recipes team, geography team, radio team, etc. And a lot of the answers were more hard-coded than the man behind the curtain would have liked you to think.
But now we know that voice prompts did not take over the world and that Alexa is about as useful as a toaster. So fire the teams, cut features people didn’t spend money on, and replace giant, hand-rolled QA-approved NLP processing trees with all the automated tech that makes the front news of HN.
Anecdotally, it feels like it goes through phases. IIRC after the wake word (OK Google) triggers the device to start recording the actual command is processed remotely. I suspect that Google Home voice commands are going to be low down the pecking order when they assign resources so it can work well when there is excess capacity but if resources are tighter they'll degrade the quality.
To me the gap in the market is for convincing advice - we probably have to admit we are past the point of “ it a device and it’s all good”.
Speaking for myself, I am technically competent but lacking the time to invest to find all the pitfalls for simple home network management - I mean really simple.
So I have a growing family and want to
- end my ISP at a router I own and control with say openWRT.
- run cabling to each floor because the wifi turns to dog crap after a few yards indoors
- replace two “smart TVs” that we spend more time fighting probably with computer monitors but all I want is a dumb screen that does what it says
- then tell me what plugs into the hdmi port of that dumb screen? A raspberry pi? What’s it running? Can I use an apple something something - what’s the uo or down side?
- I am not even thinking about turning on light bulbs or central heating yet.
There is a small book or maybe an hour or twos youtube video on this and then I am clicking the affiliate links - but I need to trust the advice .. does it exist?
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I really like the Hue ecosystem but not being able to keep buying into it a mere 5 years later is a big turnoff.
One of the two newer bulbs from Philips supported Matter by updating the firmware. It wasn’t at all clear that would be the case when I purchased them.
Finally, I’ve learned to avoid anything that supports “Siri shortcuts.” I want actual support so my home app and thus HomePods can do the right thing out of the box.
WiFi connected IoT is a total no go to me, besides a hub that is as open and customizable as a PC, which handles any interaction the devices might need with the internet.
If I make an announcement using Alexa with an Echo speaker, I want my Google Home speakers/hubs and other devices to also get the announcement. If someone rings my Nest Doorbell, I want to be able to access the video feed on my LG TV or Echo Hub. If I have some form of sensor that I want to use from a manufacturer, I shouldn't need their hub to talk to it. Whatever I'm using as my control system or hub should already be compatible, but even with Matter-supported sensors/devices, these are all still issues.
My cynical take is that there is no growth multiple or data economies that can be harvested without a strictly controlled walled garden.
You just happen to be the one getting a "discount" on the hardware, enough for you to choose data-gathering devices over more expensive devices on the open market.
This is what we asked for when we discarded software development for "AI", aka "I'm done thinking, im just going to roll the dice on hyperparameters and evolve tech through random mutation instead of reason"
Whenever I see my friends type on an iPhone I feel vicarious pain.
And at the same time we've got Siri, Alexa/Amazon Echo stuff, and Google Home stuff that already feels dated and is actively getting worse with each passing year.
Funny that these two things are happening at the same time.
> And at the same time we've got Siri, Alexa/Amazon Echo stuff, and Google Home stuff that already feels dated and is actively getting worse with each passing year.
Initially, when they were new, also Siri, Alexa and Google Home felt mindblowing and "truly like the future". My bet: in a few years these LLMs will feel similarly dated.
Concerning your "is actively getting worse with each passing year" point: do you remember these HN posts from the last months where people were complaining that ChatGPT and GPT-4 have become worse than they were initially? In other words: it's already happening. :-)
Strong disagree on that one. It was difficult to get them to do simple things like give the weather if a different location, play the right song. Even asking what time it is wasn't guaranteed to give you an answer if you didn't ask the right way. The marketting material made it sound great but the first hand experience was very underwhelming. The biggest use case at launch was making it say funny things.
We've seen a similar thing with big companies putting in LLM chatbots for customer service -- turns out LLMs can go off the rails really easily with the right prompts.
Huh. Apparently not. I wonder why.
I've been running smart switches, bulbs, thermostats, sensors, etc. using a Raspberry Pi, a Z-Wave USB stick, and openHAB as my automation center for years now. I have a remote-control cloud component, but I run it myself and have full control over it. All my in-home devices (save one) support local control and don't require an internet connection. But no way is your average (or even above-average) non-technical person going to be able to set up something like this. The software is not friendly, the hardware is fiddly to set up, and updates are rarely seamless.
Certainly someone could build a product around these things, and work to make it more reliable and consumer-friendly. But if they're going to resist the temptation to monetize further in anti-consumer ways, I suspect that such a system would have to cost quite a bit more up-front than the cloud-required, privacy-dubious systems on offer today. Most people will not realize why they might actually want (over the long term) the more expensive solution. So they get the cheaper stuff, and then get upset in a year or three when the company that runs it screws them over.
As in, find an investor willing to put up a lot of cash up front with a long payback period with a product in a competitive consumer electronic segment where margins decline over time.
I'll agree that the voice recognition has gotten worse.
But now we know that voice prompts did not take over the world and that Alexa is about as useful as a toaster. So fire the teams, cut features people didn’t spend money on, and replace giant, hand-rolled QA-approved NLP processing trees with all the automated tech that makes the front news of HN.
So presumably they just have stopped using as many resources for the recognition.
Speaking for myself, I am technically competent but lacking the time to invest to find all the pitfalls for simple home network management - I mean really simple.
So I have a growing family and want to
- end my ISP at a router I own and control with say openWRT.
- run cabling to each floor because the wifi turns to dog crap after a few yards indoors
- replace two “smart TVs” that we spend more time fighting probably with computer monitors but all I want is a dumb screen that does what it says
- then tell me what plugs into the hdmi port of that dumb screen? A raspberry pi? What’s it running? Can I use an apple something something - what’s the uo or down side?
- I am not even thinking about turning on light bulbs or central heating yet.
There is a small book or maybe an hour or twos youtube video on this and then I am clicking the affiliate links - but I need to trust the advice .. does it exist?