by twieberneit | Sep 14, 2016 | Blog |
Amazon’s Alexa will now talk to GE’s connected appliances in a smart home push is the headline on techrepublic that got me thinking today. Home automation is definitely on the rise again. Wow, that’s cool, being able to manage my home without any remotes, which my kids tend to lose somewhere, anyways. Thinking of the kids: How about the ability to have an override on their TV usage … Home Automation is the Future Home automation or smart homes are on the list of hot topics for quite a while. The intelligent fridge that automatically orders food items that are about to run out is a decades old story. Its first mention was about 1998. Even my 12-year-old house here in NZ is fully wired and has some (not so, admittedly – but pretty expensive if you need to repair them) smart controllers which probably could control more than they effectively do. Technology like this is not only exciting but offers quite some potential to make our lives far simpler and to improve the experience of using the connected devices, well, with that of living in our homes. Still, many attempts at smart homes have been done over the years, most have failed or were not that successful. Comes the cloud and massive improvements in computing power. Comes the mobile phone and the tablet. Comes working voice recognition. Comes predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Well, AI is around since at least the mid 60s; Weizenbaum’s famous Eliza dates back to 1966. Alan Turing developed his famous test in 1950. AI was again a hip topic in the...