Are Smart Homes Ready For The Mensa Club Yet?

Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and voice recognition appear to herald the arrival of the truly smart home but there are still stumbling blocks to giving your home a three-digit IQ.

- Jimmy Yap

Here’s a quick look at what was introduced at CES 2019 in Las Vegas earlier this year: A video doorbell; a screen in the kitchen to look up cooking videos; a pet food dispenser with camera and speaker so you can check on Fido remotely and also say ‘Good boy!’ Verdict? Somewhat useful.

Also introduced were some things that were possibly less useful: A fridge that delivers news updates; a toilet bowl whose seat you control with your phone; a mirror that tells you the weather as you put on your make-up.

Each year, manufacturers roll out new smart appliances and new iterations of old smart appliances that promise more convenience, more control, and, implicitly, more happiness. Given the momentum behind this movement, and with the rise of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, voice recognition, and Internet of Things(IoT), are smart homes finally ready for primetime? The answer, unfortunately, is ‘It’s complicated’.

More and more devices are getting smart, but merely festooning your home with smart devices doesn’t raise the IQ of your home much. Voice recognition is great to have to control things -- when it works. And artificial intelligence is very exciting of course, but is bleeding-edge technology and not something widely deployed in consumer devices.

Take the concept of IoT. IoT is a sexy idea that says that you can put a sensor on anything and make it Internet-enabled. In the smart home context, it means making all your appliances Internet-enabled so you can control them remotely.