From the Editor’s Desk: Will AI Finally Make the Smart Home … Smart? ⭐

Smart home tech is a rat’s nest of incompatibility, complexity, and cost, and now it’s getting an AI upgrade. The excitement I see about this shift is disconcerting and perplexing. Will we ever learn?

Probably not.

? Hope springs eternal

I don’t know how anyone else discovers or consumes the news that comes out of our ridiculous industry, but my tech feeds have devolved into a sea of advertising masquerading as news, temporary excitement over the bauble of the day before moving on instantly to the next thing, ignorance, and other stupidity.

This is depressing, but I vaguely accept that it’s inevitable. What I don’t quite understand, and maybe never will given that I find myself falling into this trap sometimes too, is the misplaced hopefulness. Maybe, just maybe, that thing that has never worked right and has done nothing but disappoint me will finally fulfill its empty promises and make our lives whole again.

Case in point, the coverage I see in the wake of recent Amazon and Google smart home announcements. And this silliness will wind up once again later this month, or in November, whenever Apple announces a new HomePod Mini.

It’s happening!

It’s not happening. But we pretend that it is. Maybe self-delusion is part of the human condition, a biological survival mode of sorts in which hope, however impossible, gets us through the tough times mentally. I don’t know. What I do know is that we need to get past that and be more realistic. And heck, perhaps we’ll save some money and time in the process.

Amazon, Apple, and Google have pushed smart home hardware, software, services, and, more recently, even standards-based interoperability, for years. In Amazon’s case, this has generally resulted in a tsunami of announcements each Fall, followed by the quiet cancellation of approximately one-third of the products it just announced. In Apple’s and Google’s cases, we see occasional signs of life followed by literally years of flat-lining silence with no meaningful announcements or upgrades.

? It’s all about trust

Why would anyone trust any of these companies?

Let’s say you’re an Apple fan. You’re firmly immersed in the ecosystem, like a tick on a dog’s back, happily feeding Apple hundreds of dollars every month for Apple One and iCloud, and happily forking over thousands of dollars every year on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. Apple has rewarded your obedience with the Apple TV, HomePod, and HomePod Mini on the hardware front, which were last updated in 2022, 2023, and 2023/2024, respectively. There’s a HomeKit something something that predates the standards Apple mostly now supports too. It offers a Home app for managing smart home equipment, just like the other companies, but not on Apple TV for some reason. Oh, and there’s always Siri, which I think we all understand to be … lackluster. I’m trying to be kind here. But Siri did delay Apple’s smart display ambitions.

Google is even worse. This company ignores its own products and shifts strategies unexpectedly and constantly like no other, and there is no better example than its smart home offerings. Its Nest Audio and Nest Audio Mini speakers date back to 2020 and 2019, respectively. Its Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max smart displays date back to 2019. Google did at least update its TV Streamer fairly recently, in 2024, and there’s even Home app support. Granted, that app was last overhauled in 2022. But hey, it’s getting another update right now!

And then there’s Amazon. Oh God. Amazon.

What is this company? If you view Apple as a luxury brand and Google as a more mainstream alternative, then Amazon is like the Dollar Store at the mall no one visits anymore. This company sells products so cheap and uninteresting that I’m embarrassed on its behalf. Granted, its most recent smart home and entertainment products seem to be pushing upwards in both quality and price. But that happens every year or two, sort of. And it’s Yugo trying to break into the luxury car market. What do those guys know about quality? I mean, have you used a Fire tablet?

? You have to think about the intent

I know that sounds elitist. But in the sense that you get what you pay for, you really don’t. You get less. And that’s true of all three of these companies. Because if there is one thing they all have in common, and especially in the smart home, it’s a purposeful incompatibility that continues despite their respective embraces of standards like Thread and Matter. And that is all about lock-in and enshittification, plain and simple.

Like many of you, I follow this world, and hope does spring eternal. Amazon just announced the smart display upgrades I wish Google would announce (and Apple wishes it could announce, critically eyeing its stupid Siri assistant). Amazon also just announced the smart speaker upgrades that I wish Google would announce (and partially did, though its Google Home speaker is of the mini variety and won’t even ship until next spring. Next spring??)

And so I pay attention. I read, and reread, the Amazon descriptions of these products and the resulting media coverage. I am curious about some of their more interesting new features, like the ability to create surround sound systems with multiple Echo speakers placed arbitrarily around a room. But as is always the case, disappointment quickly seeps in. And then overwhelms. These products are designed, specifically designed, to be incompatible with the rest of the world. And I am freaking tired of this crap.

To get that immersive surround sound system, it’s not enough to spend several hundred dollars on speakers whose quality we are correct to suspect. We must pair them with a compatible Fire TV Stick. This is vaguely understandable, though the ad-filled Fire TV experience is an atrocity. The bigger problem is whole house audio. Where Apple has AirPlay and Google has Google Cast, or Chromecast, or whatever the frick it’s called this week, Amazon has … what? Alexa Cast? Whatever it is, this thing isn’t interoperable between Amazon’s own products and services. It will never work with anything else.

This is a huge problem.

Apple’s AirPlay is pretty widely supported. But whatever Google’s thing is called is not. Both are hit or miss on TVs, especially. Google is a non-event on speakers. Amazon is … nowhere? And thanks to Google’s ongoing legal battles with Sonos, that platform as a universal (and proprietary) standard of sorts for whole house audio is beyond undermined. Not helping matters, Sonos also jumped the shark this past year or so. Maybe you saw the news.

The reason interoperability at this level is a problem is that it’s hard for the consumer to make good choices and the mistakes are expensive. If you foolishly bought into Google’s smart home promises of several years ago and purchased Google Home and Google Home Max speakers, you know what I’m talking about. If you purchased multiple Echo speakers at any point in history, you know what it feels like to be punished because that’s all you could afford. Even the Apple world where everything supposedly works isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as I’ve discovered again and again. Everything sucks, no matter the cost.

But they’re back, baby. It’s time to break out your wallets, again, and hope that this time, they’re serious. They’re going to stick with it and reward you for locking yourself into this one-way, dead-end street. And they’re finally going to deliver meaningful advances that will change our lives. I believe it. Do you?

Don’t believe it.

I’ve often observed that personal technology is a never-ending litany of broken promises and disappointment. But within this space, the smart home stands alone at the bottom of this trough of despair. It’s never worked properly, meaning seamlessly and without any complexity or interoperability issues. And I’m not sure if it ever will. This is OK, sort of, for enthusiasts. But it’s the kiss of death for the other 99 percent of the population.

We have standards for protocols and communications, and on this, Amazon, Google, and Apple do agree. But figuring out how to put this stuff together is so time consuming and difficult that it resembles a job more than a hobby, other than the direction the money is flowing. Should we adopt something like Home Assistant, a third-party ecosystem favored by enthusiasts? Sure. Let’s put Raspberry Pis everywhere! The only thing more complex than Linux is an underpowered Linux, right?

? AI to the rescue!

I don’t know, maybe AI will make sense of this mess. Maybe. But you can’t use AI to fix a compatibility issue between your Wi-Fi network and some Zigbee dongle you bought from China. The best you can hope for is that the web content it regurgitates randomly coughs up the right answer, like the lucky spin of a roulette wheel. It happens. But we’re on our own.

If personal technology is disappointing and smart home technology is even more disappointing, then what happens when we add AI to this heady mix? AI is, after all, the grand mal seizure of technology, this thing that you try to reason with even though it keeps behaving unpredictably. In the scope of all the mistakes one can imagine AI making, I suppose turning on smart lights at the wrong time isn’t as serious as, say, launching missiles at another country in error. But on a personal level, it’s a problem. And it’s the one you and I will need to deal with.

So, yes, please, let’s AI all the things. I will forget all the broken promises that this industry has made, dating back to the paperless office in the 1970s. I will pretend that these companies can’t even handle app notifications correctly, and …

You know what? I can’t pretend.

I can’t even get my smart watch to stop pinging every time Google Photos wants to show off some AI-hallucinated creation, basically an overly saturated version of a photo I took and never much cared for, like some untalented child holding up a drawing of something, whatever it is, for the refrigerator. Smart watches are another ridiculous “smart” device whose primary function appears to be chewing up battery life faster than the most powerful gaming PCs. This is possibly Tim Cook’s legacy, I’ve lost track.

Our industry is ridiculous. And we are even more ridiculous for trusting in these companies. All of us.