future shock

I stopped in at a Best Buy this evening, not having been in one for years.  Wow!  A huge amount of floor space devoted to Echo, Google Home, Hue lighting, Bluetooth deadbolts, surveillance cameras, etc.  It seems that home automation has suddenly become mainstream.  I just wonder if it's a bubble that's going to pop, or if it's going to be even bigger next year.

Favorite (entertaining) automation display here related to a big box hardware store Nest display a year or so ago and watching two folks in white robes (moo moo's)  genuflect in front of the Nest display.

It's become a huge market ever since we got these very simple Nest, Hue, Ring, and other such devices that make it so you don't need to know much about electronics or networking... just pay a monthly fee or buy the right hardware and it all comes together.   Oddly there seems to be missing a way to interface all the old school stuff (Elk, UPB, Russound) with the convenience of Apple Home or Amazon Echo or Google Home. 
 
In a way, it's taken all the fun out of it for me.  All the really good old school players are sorta dying off, and the new ones are actually more disjointed and less reliable and come with monthly costs quite often.  Alarm.com, Ring, etc - all cost monthly; and quite frankly, tin-hat aside, I'm not a fan of having my every action controlled/monitored by the cloud.  Next house will either be RTI or Crestron, or I'll just skip it altogether. 
 
I recently sold my automated house and I currently live in a rental 1200 miles away... how weird it is to go from total control to a handful of hue lights... that said, I just realized I can pick up the AppleTV remote and tell Siri to do my biddings (despite no app control?  I hate voice control!) and it works great!

Work2Play said:

  I hate voice control!

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:hesaid:

If your primary exposure to voice control is Siri then it is understandable that you hate it, I would too. On the other hand my main experience with Alexa is that family members who were frustrated with different aspects of the house automation, especially Sonos, immediately adapted to Alexa with no problem whatsoever. I went from hearing constant complaining about how hard it was to do things to instead hearing amusing stories about the latest silly thing that Alexa said or did. The difference in stress for me makes me a voice control cheerleader for life!
 
As far as old school stuff, the first thing I ever had Alexa control was my ISY-99. I have also found that Homeseer can bridge Alexa to pretty much anything so I just stay away from the fee based cloud service offerings.

I enjoyed recently walking into a BB, seeing their setup, being accosted (it wasn't quite that bad) by a young man hawking the virtues of home automation.  I said, wow, very interesting, but can you do this, at which point I pulled out my phone and showed him my CQC interface that controlled 80% of the wares being sold (okay maybe a bit less than that) by 1 app, 1 interface, and then went on to explain the difference between remote control (for most of the products) and home automation (some of the products like the SmartThings hub, and very baby steps for Hue and a few others) with full blown cause and effect controls based on events or environmental cues that are situation contextual aware.  (Yes I know, I representing .000000000001 % of the population today)
 
The good news is that it is mainstream now - BB proves it with their dedicated floor space right? - however, the message the customer is getting is not about home automation, it's about easy remote control of disparate things which is a great hook up until the point people figure out they want to do more and can't because there is no way to build rules based on contexts to make things happen. Let's hope this is the beginning of a revolution on the evolution of the automation space. 
 
We're still not to the "it just all comes together" point that was referenced in an earlier post, not even close unless you consider a Google Assistant, Echo, Siri (not so much) the ultimate universal remote then yes it does "mostly just come together."
 
Now, how to convert those folks into paying customers for true home automation. 
 
Voice control has its place, it's an improved form of remote control and especially useful if you can build the recognition heuristics such that you can elicit results without resorting to absolute scripted phrases / phrasing. That and being able to stack commands naturally.  e.g. "hey google, turn the lights on in the kitchen and I want to listen to Jazz." This request should result in the kitchen lights being turned on (all of them since you didn't specify which one) and music to start playing out of the speakers that service the kitchen area.  As it is now for the most part it's scripted via a very specific construct to achieve specific results.
 
Don't mind me, I'm on really good drugs from recent foot surgery so this all may just be a bunch of babble...

I think what happened was when the entire work got a smartphone, now "Home Automation" has become "download the free XYZ app." and "control your gadget with that."  You now have "Home Automation" for $200. Now you can impress your friends that you can unlock your door, or turn on your family room lamp when you are 300 miles away.  Add in a $29.99 Echo and you can unlock your door with that.  Not all that useful, but most people are easily impressed.

I also have a bunch of Amazon devices, so not just Siri - but as batwater said above, it's annoying that I can't just say "turn on boy 1's light to 40% and turn it red, and set Boy 2's light to Green at 35%".  Instead it's 4 separate commands.  It's faster to just do it manually via the Home interface.

It's all good.  The market for diehard home automation enthusiasts was never big enough by itself to get much done (without a lot of effort that is).  Just not enough money in it.  But if BB is devoting that kind of floor space to it, then whatever "it" is, there's enough money in it to make stuff happen, even if it's just making what we already have more easy to use for "the rest of us."

Work2Play said:

I also have a bunch of Amazon devices, so not just Siri - but as batwater said above, it's annoying that I can't just say "turn on boy 1's light to 40% and turn it red, and set Boy 2's light to Green at 35%".  Instead it's 4 separate commands.  It's faster to just do it manually via the Home interface.

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Not to quibble, but if that is something you do regularly, you can create a scene with those settings and trigger it with one command.  For grins, I created a Homekit scene called "HoHoHo".  Telling Siri to "Set HoHoHo" turns on the Christmas tree lights, an interior globe light and the external holiday lights.
 
Alexa got the ability to do scenes recently, didn't it?
 
Craig
 
(All three of those are also controlled by timers--voice control of the scene is basically showing off.)