Technology

Bad setup isn't a reason why something is a bad idea. Whatever your opinions of cars are, talking about how bad they would be if everyone drove drunk doesn't really prove your point.

In any security system, and this should also apply to home automation, one of the things you have to account for is failure. If you don't have a graceful failure mode, you will have a bad time. And context matters. If my security system fails at home, defaulting to unlocked doors makes sense, especially if it's due to an emergency like a fire. If the security system in a virology lab fails, you probably don't want all the doors unlocked, and you may decide to have none of the doors unlocked, because the consequences of having the doors unlocked is greater than having them locked. Likewise, but of a much less serious nature, if your home automation fails, you should have some way of controlling the lights. If you don't, again, it hasn't failed gracefully.

Pre-Alexa-Plus it wasn’t AI, it was simple pattern matching with very constrained commands.

They’ve replaced these very limited sets of commands with bullshit interpretation that tries to not only understand “like a human” but respond in a similar manner. Those same commands can now be interpreted in a number of ways, and you have no guarantee how it will be taken.

Coffee machines are for the weak anyway, French press that shit and be smug about it!

I just saw an ad for Alexa+ at a family member's house and was a bit surprised initially. The last I had known about the personal home assistant market was that both Google and Amazon were growing bored with its lack of annually doubling revenue and were slow-walking their whole participation in it to the grave, slashing those departments and walking back forecasted products.

To the home automators like you and others, am I mistaken or has it seen a resurgence now that they realize they can take another crack at it with LLMs this time?

Exact same with Google with Gemini. Think can't flip switches, play podcasts...

HomeAssistant is the answer.

Or if you want a simple & cheap off the shelf solution, IKEA stuff has being online as an option, not a requirement, and all the devices are ZigBee or matter compatible and not locked to some proprietary WiFi cloud bullshit.

airgapped

It's not adopted widely because every single smart home device marketed to normies is infected with cloud bullshit. Go to Home Depot or whatever and look on the shelf: literally every single product will have "Works with Alexa," "Works with Google Home," and/or "Works with Apple HomeKit" badges stamped all over the package, but not a single one will mention a damn thing about Home Assistant even when the device actually is compatible. The closest you get is ones that mention "Matter" 'cause it's at least supposed to be a standard, but it feels like it's getting slow-walked harder than CableCard sometimes (and if you don't remember how that worked out, the answer is "not well").

I would almost call it a conspiracy against openness, but it's really just the banal result of no rent-seeking leading to no excess profit to plow back into marketing... which is even worse.

Most people don't find turning the lights off and on burdensome enough to justify a whole lot of effort to avoid.

https://xkcd.com/927/

I suspect the average smart home is not based on home assistant, but on an ikea hub with their app, or similar.

If you are willing to selfhost a home assistant, then it is not a barrier to add various antennas to it.

So this step to standardization might help mixing different manufacturer products easier. We will see how standard their implementations will be. We had zigbee as shared standard in theory what only worked properly with the manufacturers hub.

It's why I live so much commercial stuff and things like bacnet.

Everything basically is just basic I/O with either analog or digital signal wires. Well documented. But it typically requires lots of actual wires running back to a controller.

I hate how consumer stuff is all different connections in so many different ways and they don't care if they deprecate a feature or something. What works today can be fucked up because they have unilateral control to change how their shit works in "updates."

Coffee machine??? I hand-grind my coffee every morning in a mortar and pestle and then use my Rok to manually press the perfect espresso.

But I also let a self-hosted AI model control the lights and HVAC in my house, cause it does it way better than I ever could manually.

I use my coffee machine as an alarm. Like a really pleasant morning alarm for the whole house. It's nice. Works every time.

I'm also old fashioned and it was always faster for me to reach to light switch than to unlock my phone, find the app and toggle it from there.

or even better yet get a non-electronic coffe maker, just the carafe or a french press.

You missing theoint of the "real" smart home what would be an automated solution based on environment and not a fancy remote controller to your lights.

Human presence sensors combo with light sensors, and you never have to think about turning lights on or off, and leave the voice assistant for overrides. Temperature sensor aligned with your callendar and weather data make your home warm or cool before you arrive and save on your heating without adjusting.

Cool, you gonna hang out in my greenhouse and wake me up when the temp drops below a certain point? What about alert me to an increasing trend of the sump pump running more often?

Home automation isn’t just “Alexa I’m lazy turn off the light switch I’m next to” and presenting it as such is simply disingenuous.

Check out home assistant sometime