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Yeh, we do the same, as I was bloviating at length above. It's still pretty limited in terms of creating anything like a 'smart home' without extensive user intervention to make it so. And it has various caveats, which I mention above.

I guess I should have asked in there somewhere, can you point to any example of an auto-generated user interface for a Homekit system? So that we could see how 'smart' it can be on its own? I've never seen one, but I've not been really looking for one either.

As I mentioned though, nothing is free. If it has lots of latitude, then it becomes that much harder to create generic user interfaces and logic that will still work if you swap out a device. The device capabilities stuff (we call them 'device classes') really are for multiple things:   1. They...

I'm sure they provide basic info regarding capabilities, but that's not really sufficient. Even very detailed, very strictly enforced information is still a challenge when it comes to really allowing the system itself to create something for you that's actually what any of us would consider...

Don't forget knowing when you are really, really lonely and feeling vulnerable.

  But any auto-generated UI is going to be very generic, and will almost certainly not include any sort of 'activity oriented' logic. That requires the user to set it up. Otherwise, it's nothing beyond the remote control on a phone. It will only know who to present you with a list of lights, a...

BTW, I failed to point out that 'old school' automation is hardly an utter failure. Crestron is like a half billion dollar company or thereabouts. And of course you'd have to include Elk, HAI (before Lutron), Lutron, and a number of other medium to fairly large companies in that account as well...

No, I said pressing a button on a phone to turn on a light, i.e. a simple one to one correspondence just as if it were a remote control is not automation, and of course it's not, by definition. Nothing is automated in that scenario. And that's an awful lot of what's going on out there.    And I...

  Well, there are 'wrong directions' wrt to achieving a goal that somehow everyone seems to want, e.g. the 'smart home'. What's happening now is wreathed in smart home hype, but it has nothing to do with creating a smart home. That's not just whining about something happening that you don't...

Or, just use an automation system that supports the Echo, and which lets you define arbitrary commands and react to them in arbitrary ways, instead of being limited to what Amazon defines.

  You're doing it again. It's condescending. I have no jealousy that new initiatives are ignoring me. I'm unhappy that they are getting so much attention for doing something that really isn't moving us in the right direction. That makes lots of people think that pressing a button on a smart...

  You are just wrong about that. It's the environment, and this is easily proven. Name almost any truly smart aspect to a home, and look at how it has to be done to be robust and reliable and to be significantly customized to the gear the user has and how he wants it all to work together, and...

  The problem is everyone comes up with these analogies but the examples are often about how to do one specific thing. Creating a smart home is not one thing. Replacing a printing press with a laser printer is just one way to print out something vs. another. The person who wanted to print...

  Why do you insist on arguing that anyone who disagrees with you is somehow incapable of understanding and making use of recent technology? We've supported the Echo for a long time now.    As to your other part of the last 20%, yeh, that is the hard part. And the fact that it's not been done...

  But there's no such thing as cloud based automation. There's cloud based monitoring and reaction to things that are happening locally. In any serious automation solution there will still be LOTS of stuff local, and plenty of things that can still go wrong. It's not like running Office...

That's not quite the same thing. The level of interaction with streaming media systems is small and very infrequent and the worst case scenario is that you don't get watch Wheel of Fortune today or something. The requirements for automation, if it's serious automation, that requires low latency...

  What would they have marketed? Buy before midnight tonight and it's only $20,000? There's no way to deliver an actually smart home for any price that would have attracted enough people (who were not of the sort who already knew they wanted some such thing) to justify the cost of the marketing...

  Actually Z-Wave locks do generally report the user code. Not that I'm advocating the use of Z-Wave, but just FYI.

  That model is not universally applicable, at least not at that price. You can lease a car, but not for $20 a month. Things that are necessarily sold in lower volumes and have higher development costs aren't going to work like that.     That's pretty much the attitude I was talking about. The...

  I think that the vendors of those products would be surprised to find that they've done nothing all that time. What's happened in the last couple years is a lot of standalone doo-dads and partial solutions mostly, many of which have already gone down the tubes and a lot more of which will...