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Amid the breathless hype surrounding artificial intelligence, it’s easy to forget that not long ago, tech companies were trying to sell us on a different idea: the smart home, an ecosystem of internet-connected automated appliances, like a refrigerator that orders milk when it’s running low.
Although plenty of smart appliances like dishwashers, coffee makers and smoke detectors flooded the market, interest in the idea of an automated household never took off. The smart home was complex. The devices also created frustrations, like privacy concerns and thermostats that didn’t work once they stopped receiving software updates.
The tech industry is hoping that AI will ease the pain of setting up a smart home. In interviews, executives at Google and Amazon acknowledged that the original premise of the smart home resonated with only a small group of power users who had the technological know-how to configure one. The companies said their new AI assistants, Gemini and Alexa+, would make it easier for families to enjoy living in one together.
Anish Kattukaran, Google’s head of product overseeing its home devices, said his own family never bothered with smart home devices because of their complexity. “It takes a lot to do it,” he said. “This is where I think Gemini can be pretty transformative.”
Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s vice president overseeing Alexa, said Amazon shared a similar goal. “One of the things we’re going after with Alexa+ is trying to eliminate the role of home IT administrator,” he said. “It’s frustrating for everyone in the house.”
Google and Amazon both say that because generative AI, the technology powering chatbots, makes it easier to talk to our devices, setting up a smart home will become a breeze. In theory, people should be able to program their home devices to do things, like make light bulbs glow red when a smoke detector goes off, simply by asking the AI assistant.
To put this to the test, I ordered a set of new home accessories, including internet-connected light bulbs and motion sensors. I set up the devices with Alexa+, which Amazon released last month.
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Google, which is preparing to release a new smart speaker with Gemini this spring, declined to give The New York Times early access to its AI assistant to test smart home products, so I did not include Gemini in this column.
The upshot: While Alexa+ sped up some parts of setting up the smart home, some features simply didn’t work. The overall experience of downloading a bunch of different apps for each accessory was still time-consuming and frustrating even for a non-novice like me — and AI didn’t help with that. To put it another way, the most nagging problems with the smart home remain unsolved.
Getting Set Up
To get started, I powered on Amazon’s Echo Show, a $150 internet-connected screen, and activated Alexa+, the successor to Alexa. I also downloaded the Alexa app to my smartphone.
The role of an AI assistant like Alexa+ in the smart home is to act as the central hub for controlling all the home accessories and getting them to work together. Amazon said it had focused on streamlining its design to make it easier to set up a smart home with Alexa+.
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To add a smart home device to Alexa, you open the Alexa smartphone app, tap on the Devices menu and tap the + button to add an accessory, such as a lightbulb. After adding the device, you can program a routine by saying to Alexa something like, “If the motion sensor in the garage goes off, I want you to set off an alarm and send a notification to my phone.”
For accessories, I ordered a door sensor and a motion sensor from TP-Link, a water leak detector from Kidde and two light bulbs from WiZ. Here’s how it went for each accessory.
Smart Lights
Internet-controlled lights can be programmed to do things like turn on or off or dim to a specific brightness at a certain time of day. I installed two WiZ light bulbs — one on my porch and the other in my bedroom — and hit the + button in the Alexa app to try to connect them to Alexa+.
Here’s where I groaned: I had to install the separate app for the lightbulb before Alexa+ could control it. It would be much easier if home accessories could be set up within the Alexa app.
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Begrudgingly, I downloaded the WiZ app from the App Store and created an account to get the lights working. Once I finished, I was able to easily add the bulbs to my Alexa app and label them accordingly (“bedroom light” and “porch light”).
I often leave my porch light on overnight by accident, so I said to Alexa, “I want you to program the porch light to shut off at 10 p.m.” Amazon’s AI assistant created a routine to turn off that light at 10 p.m. That worked well.
Next, I wanted to see if Alexa+ could do something more complicated for my bedroom light: gradually dim the light starting around 9:30 p.m. for an hour so that it would turn off by the time I fell asleep. “Alexa, gradually fade the light for the next hour until it shuts off,” I said.
“OK,” Alexa replied. But Alexa let me down. It skipped the fade and turned off the light.
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“Seriously?” said my wife, who has grown exasperated with my smart home experiments for years.
Amazon confirmed that it was working to fix a bug related to dimming light bulbs.
Door Sensor
To install a door sensor for home security from TP-Link, I again had to install a separate app from the App Store, this one called Tapo, before adding it to my Alexa app. I stuck the sensor to the corner of the door for my backyard.
Because I open this door to let my dogs outside and often forget to close it, I told Alexa, “Create a routine for the door sensor so that I get an alert if the door is open for more than 30 minutes.” Alexa+ responded that it had created the routine.
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To test it, I left the door open for 30 minutes. An alarm went off on the Echo Show in my kitchen, alerting me that the door was still open. Eureka!
Or so I thought. A few hours later, I heard the blaring again, even though I could see my door was closed. I ran to the Echo Show to turn off the alarm. My nanny, who had just put my toddler down for a nap, looked puzzled.
Motion Sensor
Inside my garage, I installed a TP-Link motion sensor to scan for intruders. It kept unnecessarily alerting me to movements like when my wife was exercising on her spin bike. So after adding the sensor to my Alexa app, I asked Alexa+ to create a routine to alert me to motion in the garage only when I am out of town traveling for two weeks later this month.
“I should mention that the current routine system doesn’t support specific date ranges,” Alexa said. The AI said I would need to manually activate the motion sensor whenever I traveled.
So much for intelligence.
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Water Leak Detector
The last accessory I set up was a water leak detector from Kidde, the maker of home safety equipment. After I downloaded the Kidde app, it said it would send me an email to verify my account before I could set up the leak detector. The email did not arrive. I called customer service, which confirmed there was an internal issue.
A day later, I finally got the email and activated the sensor. I placed it under a sink.
This issue with Kidde illustrates why people never latched onto the smart home: Adding an internet connection and app to a mundane appliance creates an extra layer of complication, and more things can go wrong, such as a company’s server outage. That’s why it would be better if smart home accessories could be set up entirely by an AI assistant like Alexa+ (and eventually Gemini) within its own app, bypassing the need for a separate one.
“The smart home definitely needs to keep getting easier,” Rausch said in a statement. He added that Alexa+ was making progress, that customer use of smart home features had increased as a result and that the experience would continue to improve.
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Considering it has been more than a decade since I started testing home products, I’m not convinced that we’ll see a hassle-free smart home that a family can enjoy together anytime soon.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
