These new innovations make smart homes easier to control and set up

Smart, connected devices like lights, locks, curtains, thermostats, robot vacuums, and security cameras can make your home more convenient, safer, and sometimes even fun. But even if you go all out to connect every device in your home, there are still two things that make the smart home a hard sell for many families. You need your phone to control things 80% of the time, and getting all these devices to work harmoniously together in a smart home through routines and automation can often be confusing and complicated.

Thankfully, there is finally some real solution to these two challenges through more and better smart home control interfaces, as well as the smart use of generative artificial intelligence that makes device automation as easy as typing in what you want. motivation.

While voice control and smart displays present a more democratic way to control home devices, controlling lights, curtains, locks and scenes from your phone is often still faster and more reliable due to clunky terminology and underpowered hardware. This is a problem because it means one person in the household ends up being the master of all connected things (through folders with dozens of separate apps, but that’s another issue), while everyone else ends up living in a semi-authoritarian state Under the control of the person and their smartphone.

As I’ve said many times before, we need more and better interfaces to control devices. Smart home control Needs to be intuitive and easy to use for everyone. You know, like a light switch, only better.

While the chances of these gadgets finding their way into your home are slim, these are great ideas and I hope we see more like them soon. However, there’s an innovative new interface I saw everywhere at CES 2024 that you can actually use today: map view.

All the big tech companies at CES this year showed off new map-based interfaces for interacting with smart home devices through their platforms, including LG, Samsung, Amazon, and even larger ones like TP-Link’s Tapo Small company. These interfaces present a 3D map view of your home and place connected devices throughout that you can control by simply pointing and clicking.

Put it on a public tablet (Amazon is bringing Map View to its new Echo Hub smart display and Tapo to its iPad app) or the screen of a smart refrigerator, for those unfamiliar, on your couch Instead of poring over a list of devices in a smartphone app or guessing the device name when asking a voice assistant to turn it on, it becomes easier to control specific smart lights.

Put the map view on your TV, however, and it suddenly becomes more familiar to everyone in the house. Samsung’s Map View can now run on your TV, LG may also use its ThinQ platform, or now that all LG TVs can become Google Home hubs, we’ll see Google enter this space as well. Amazon Fire TV apparently makes it easy to do this. Now, anyone in the home can pick up the TV remote and control the lights, thermostat, shades or cameras with just a click.

I saw a demo of Samsung’s SmartThings map view on a Samsung TV using the remote at CES, and it reminded me of the Logitech Harmony remote that I miss so much. Map View gives you an easy way to point and control any device in your home from the comfort of your couch, without the need for separate hardware.

Many of us still prefer to use physical buttons to control our homes, which is where smart buttons (also known as scene controllers) start to gain some traction as a good solution for smart home control. This is the light switch, evolved.

A smart button is typically a wireless device that can be mounted on a wall, looks like a switch, or can be used as a handheld or desktop device. Smart buttons do not control a single circuit like a switch, nor do they control a single device like a traditional infrared remote control. Instead, they can be programmed to control any number of devices or scenes connected to it.

With the emergence of the new smart home standard Matter, many smart buttons have the potential to become even more useful, as you can connect lights, locks, curtains, robot vacuums, thermostats, etc. from different manufacturers and control them through Them: One push.

Flic, Tuo, Onvis and other companies have developed smart buttons that can or should soon support Matter. However, currently the only one of the four major Matter platforms that supports buttons is Apple Home. Samsung SmartThings, Amazon Alexa and Google Home have all said they are working on adding the feature, but none have provided a timetable for when Matter button support will arrive.

At CES, smart lighting company GE Cync showed off a prototype of a new smart button that works with Matter. Inspired by the high-end scene controllers you might find in professionally installed systems managed by its parent company, Savant, GE Cync’s scene controllers are designed to control lighting groups or scenes with each button. With Matter, you can connect lights and devices from any manufacturer that are compatible with Matter.

Nanoleaf showed off its Sense Plus smart wireless switch, which debuted at CES last year but now says it will be available this summer. With six mappable buttons, you should be able to use them to control Nanoleaf’s smart light bulbs directly over a local Thread connection, or tie the buttons into a smart scene from any Matter-compatible platform and control them with the push of a button Multiple devices.

The biggest problem with smart buttons is remembering which button controls which scene, set of lights, or other fixture. Some products, such as Onvis with its 5-Key Thread smart switch, solve this problem with stickers that look a bit sloppy. Leviton lets you order engraved buttons for your scenes on its wired scene controllers, but that’s still a matter of smart buttons.

Linxura has a clever solution: The $100 Linxura Smart Controller has a click wheel around the e-paper screen that displays four devices at once, including lights, shades, locks, and fans, allowing you to easily navigate between them. Switch between and click to control. According to the company, it currently supports IFTTT, Alexa and Google, with Matter support coming via a firmware update in the second quarter.

All this talk about control shows that today’s smart homes still rely heavily on remote control. While technologies like radio frequency sensing are making huge strides, ambient smart homes that understand their environment (and can know when to turn on this light and at what brightness based on who is in the room and where it is) are still a long way off.

No, I don’t think AI-powered home robots are the solution here—the AI ​​agent robot LG showed off at CES felt more authoritarian than useful, and Samsung’s Ballie’s best trick is its projector screen. But the environment that connected devices in our homes can provide will be key. LG says it’s ready to use so-called “instant life data” collected from the 7 billion connected devices in people’s homes to understand how you use your home and respond more intuitively. (With your permission).

Today, however, it’s increasingly easier to create more complex automations and scenarios that make smart homes feel more magical, thanks to generative artificial intelligence. At CES, smart home companies Govee and Aqara both demonstrated how they use generative artificial intelligence to help users create and execute routines, which would be cumbersome and time-consuming if users set them up themselves.

Now, with AI lighting robots, you can tell the Govee app you want a “Barbie Dreamhouse-style effect,” without having to go through and individually program every Govee smart light you own to appear in various shades of pink. Govee’s bot will do it for you.

Aqara has also added a new Home Copilot to its smart home platform. First, Home Copilot will be a chatbot within the Aqara app that can understand natural language so you can ask it to set up an automation to turn off the lights, lock the doors and lower all curtains at 10pm.

Ultimately, Aqara says Home Copilot will be able to analyze usage patterns in Aqara homes and proactively recommend customized automation, including tailored energy-saving automation plans. With Aqara opening up its platform to third-party Matter devices via its new hub M3, this could be a very powerful tool.

Aqara also showed off a concept device at its booth that lets you talk directly to Home Copilot. Wireless voice controllers have a microphone inside them that only activates when you pick them up.

Artificial intelligence is not new in the smart home space—Google Home and Amazon Alexa have been slowly integrating it into their platforms at different levels, and machine learning has been powering smart home security cameras for some time. But the power of generative artificial intelligence looks set to revolutionize smart homes, making them easier to use and overall feel smarter. Combined with the interoperability that Matter is (slowly) introducing into the field, I’m excited to see the smart home enter this new era.