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How smart is your home?
The tech that arrived in the post-Advertising Age has continued to find uses in our homes. Now, home appliances are becoming increasingly connected – with some displaying the latest and greatest in connectivity, intelligent connectivity and networked-everything-ness. Homes around the world are getting smarter, with products from lights to thermostats now linked to the internet. This has led to the arrival of a host of connected appliances in the home, from fridges that tell you if you need milk, to cameras that let you see what's happening at the front door. It's essential that your appliances and other electronics, such as thermostats, refrigerators and lights, are properly connected to your home network so they can be controlled and monitored remotely. For example, you can use your smartphone or tablet to set a temperature for your home while you're away. If your home Wi-Fi is weak or slow, to make your Wi-Fi the best it can be, consider adding a whole-house wireless router (like the Netgear Orbi) to your network.
In December 2016, we were invited to a unique Christmas light show. Incidentally, the light show originated from an Easter Egg. The Falcon Wings of Tesla Model X flapped gracefully to the of “Wizards of Winter” by Trans-Siberian orchestra and synchronous lighting show. The light show was Elon Musk’s Christmas present to Tesla owners. A few days ago, in the same home, we witnessed yet another lighting show. This time there were grand chandeliers and other designer lights all across the home, in every living area, controlled by an app on the owner’s mobile device. This was no present from Musk! The owner, Girish V., a geek with a deep interest in lighting, researched some pretty funky yet exotic looking fixtures. For the most part Girish mounted, installed and integrated them on his own, with a rare helping hand to haul up the larger one or some electrical help for the more complicated wiring. When one looks at the lights, lights, here, there, everywhere (including cool, designer lights in the basement!), one can’t help but wonder why! “Girish loves lights”, says his wife Ashwini, very simply. Girish elaborates a little more, “I hail from Bangalore, and I was always fascinated by the lights at Mysore Palace.” To power all these lights in their home, as well as the Tesla, they have installed Solar Panels for clean energy.
I find that each one of these exotic lights can be controlled by a console on their mobile. They do have it setup to be voice activated using Alexa, however they prefer to use the mobile app control. I wonder aloud if they have other smart home devices. Well, the lights are just the beginning. At any point they have around 80 devices connected to the WiFi. So I decide to take a tour.
As I take a step towards the kitchen, I ask, what about cleaning? They have the Roomba and its mopping pair Braava. These devices are programmed to run at particular times of the day, and to cover predetermined areas, for example, based on the frequency of use. I know they have the Rotimatic - the automatic Roti (Indian flat bread) maker - as I have tasted the fresh, aromatic Rotis from this machine before. All their appliances are IoT enabled. The Samsung refrigerator has a “Family Hub” which allows one to manage the food inside better. The same app manages their Samsung dishwasher, and shows a notification that the dishwasher needs a filter replacement soon. I turn to wash my hands in the kitchen sink, the tap has a motion sensor.
Most of these devices discussed here, that are connected to the internet, hence called IoT (Internet of Things) devices, haven’t gotten to a point of being mission critical for home use. The central access and monitoring of these devices is more of a convenience feature. However, with more IoT devices for home healthcare, concerns such as device and power uptime, connectivity and security will all become paramount.
With the inspiration of so many smart devices, I was tempted to try to automate my writing. I decided to give OpenAI’s gpt-3 (deep learning neural network architecture for NLP) a try, which is backed by the likes of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Microsoft, etc. Unfortunately their waiting list runs long, and they seem to have an exclusivity strategy to monetize the engine. I was able to get really small samples through third party apps. I decided to try Inferkit(beta) which is built using Megatron-11b. The opening paragraph of the blog post and parts of the last paragraph, which are both italicized, have been created using InferKit (AI).
With thousands of devices out there in the market, most homeowners own at least three smart home devices, ranging from thermostats to doorbells, and will be willing to pay up to $900 each, on average, for four devices, according to a survey conducted by Realistic Home Security, an Illinois-based home automation company, and research firm Survata. Among homeowners who plan to buy smart devices, 48 percent would be willing to pay more than $1,000, on average, to do so. Many of these smart home devices are becoming common around households, and are here to stay as they add value to homes. It was a fun and interesting tour around Girish and Ashwini’s home to see the many of the currently available smart home devices.
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