Walking Back My Google Smart Home Ambitions (Premium)

When we moved to Pennsylvania almost three years ago, I viewed this change as an opportunity to start over in many areas. Among them was our approach to smart home technology, a move we’ve made in fits and starts over time. That was by design: As I noted upfront, I knew we’d make mistakes, and that we would go down certain roads only to backtrack after things didn’t work out.

The overall results aren’t all that impressive if you’re looking for the home of the future. We’ve only sporadically installed smart home tech around this Pennsylvania home in part because of surveillance worries and in part because a lot of this technology is simply too new and too untested to trust. Our biggest changes were infrastructure-based. We completely rewired and modernized the home’s electrical system, at great cost. We adopted mesh networking for whole-house Internet coverage. And we settled on Google as our smart home platform (as opposed to, say, Amazon Alexa or Apple Siri/HomeKit).

The Google choice was pragmatic: Of those three providers and also-ran pretenders like Samsung and Microsoft, only Google had (and has) all the pieces in place to be successful, including its AI and machine learning expertise and its global presence and automatic deployment via Android, the world’s most successful personal computing platform. Google, most assuredly, I figured, would overtake Amazon to become the world’s leading smart home platform.

It hasn’t quite worked out that way, of course. Instead, Amazon has aggressively defended its market power by releasing an astonishing array of new devices and services each fall. And Google has, well, dropped the ball. There are new products each year, but only a few, and the firm just doesn’t seem to have its head in this game. For some reason.

That doesn’t bother me either way. I’m not really a huge Google fan per se, and it’s easy and even inexpensive to move between smartphone platforms because this market is decidedly unsticky and (at least ad-hoc) standards-based. (This softens the blow, I hope, for Cortana fans.)

Anyway. The Google stuff has worked, sort of. But there have been issues.

The first, of course, was that Google unceremoniously dropped its excellent Chromecast Audio dongle, and while my initial reaction was to buy an extra one just in case, I’m now wondering if this wasn’t related to the Sonos lawsuit, in which that company charged Google with copying its proprietary technology. Regardless of that, I started experiencing connectivity issues with the Chromecast Audio last year, and I think I’m right to be worried that these issues will now never be really fixed.

Separately from that, we also added some Google Home and Home Mini speakers to the mix over time, and their usage multiplied when Google added stereo pairing support. So we had two Google Homes in the kitchen in a pair and two in the living room as a separate pair. We also have two Lenovo-branded but Google-compatible smart displays, which we really enjoy, and a Lenovo smart clock that is really just a mini smart display. This was all done at a time when I still believed using Google for whole-house audio was the way to go.

Over time, however, it became obvious that maybe this wasn’t the best approach. The whole-house audio thing worked, such as it was. But whenever someone would try to control it via voice, it was never clear what device would do what. Sometimes a phone would handle the actual listening but then the answer or whatever would randomly play on a speaker. It was silly at first. And then just annoying.

But even when things did work, using voice for some simple interactions was painful. For example, saying “Hey, Google, play 80s music with Spotify on the sunroom speakers” is a bit tedious to come up with. It’s often easier to just use an app.

When Sonos announced its lawsuit against Google, I finally had enough. And as I wrote elsewhere, I started testing whole-house audio alternatives, and have since arrived at Sonos, which is expensive but works. But I also started walking back the Google smart speakers. I remove the two Google Homes from the kitchen and replaced them with a pair of Sonos-based IKEA Symfonisk Wi-Fi Bookshelf Speakers. In the living room, I removed the two Google Home Minis, and I ordered a Sonos Beam yesterday from Amazon, and that should arrive tomorrow.

So there’s the whole house solution in a nutshell: Sonos Play:5s in the sunroom, IKEAs in the kitchen, and a Beam in the living room, plus the other Sonos Play:1 and Sonos:One speakers we have elsewhere in the house. None of them are connected to Google Assistant or any other voice-based assistant.

As for the Google stuff, in those rare instances in which we need to interact with Google Assistant, we can do so from our phones. But the thing is, we never need to do that, not really. And maybe that’s the real lesson here, that the voice-assisted ambient computing thing just isn’t where it needs to be, and that using it now is a mixed bag. One that we don’t miss when it’s gone.

I’ve often thought of ambient computing as the next wave of personal computing. But it seems now that it’s simply another way of getting things done, and instead of replacing previous methods, it will simply sit alongside them. In this way, it’s like multitouch support on PC laptops. Some people can’t live without out, while others simply ignore it or don’t even know it’s there.

We’re still using the smart displays, of course, since we really enjoy the constantly-playing photo slideshows. And while I’m sort of numb to the notion that Google is listening to us, collecting and organizing that data, and selling it to advertising, at least there are four fewer listening posts in our house now.

But now that it’s getting warmer, I’m going to allow a bit more Google into our lives by installing two Nest outdoor security cameras. But these cameras aren’t for monitoring people who come to our doors, indeed, they’ll be positioned such that we can’t use them that way. Instead, they’re to get a better idea of the wildlife—deer, mostly, but also foxes and other critters—that walk through our yard each day and night. That seems like a good use of technology, unlike that smart speaker crap.

Random aside: I originally titled this as “My Google Smart Home Defenestration,” but I asked my wife, who is also writer, if she thought the word “defenestration” was well-understood. She did not, so you can thank her for the clearer headline. 🙂