Smarthome Automation for the Holidays – TMO Daily Observations 2016-12-08
The holidays are a great time for showing off your smarthome skills, so Kelly Guimont and Dave Hamilton join Jeff Gamet to share some tips. They talk about Siri, Amazon Echo, IFTTT, and more.
Show Notes
- Holiday smarthome tips
- How to Have Santa Siri Turn On Your Christmas Lights
- IFTTT
- Amazon Echo
- WeMo Smart Switch
- Raspberry Pi
- Wink
- Wink iPhone app
- TMO Daily Observations Twitter feed
Thanks for the shout out and I will agree that reliability for home kit needs to be nearly 100% and it is not there yet. I sometimes need to ask twice when accessing items through AppleTV but wifi devices locally are 100%. Remotely I sometimes have to ask twice through siri but with iOS 10 that is few and far between.
That said, all of jeff’s concerns were around Siri not properly recognizing commands or maybe commands being asked incorrectly. I have to wonder how commands are being issued, because in most recognition tests Siri is every bit as accurate as Google and Amazon (with the exception of requests from a distance where Amazon shines). I personally use my watch normally which is very accurate for me, but I have noticed that Siri via bluetooth (in my car) is far less accurate and Siri from a distance is not a good ether.
I also wanted to strongly disagree with John who implied that accuracy was about computing power at the device. None of these systems do recognition at the device, all of it is passed to HUGE server farms! If Siri is less accurate it is because Apple’s Ai is not as good.
What was that?
Ok, I get that HomeKit requires specific security protocols (heaven forbid we have security) but you need to slow your roll on bashing it!. I have some homekit KooGeek outlets (cheaper than wemo) that setup in seconds and could easily do exactly what was describe to have “santa turn on my christmas lights” without all of the hacks and hassles. And when IFTTT goes under my solution will still work, and I shared data with nobody!
So I get that some outliers have spent a few bucks on hardware and if you want to bring that along with HomeKit you will need some bridging solutions but if you have been waiting (as I have) for a major vendor (Apple and google) to bring this party to order before spending money on it, there is nothing wrong wth Siri and HomeKit. It would be very interesting to do the “anything you can do I can do better” game with you using just Siri and the HomeKit devices that are currently available and that list gets bigger every day.
For me it is a front door deadbolt, and two light switches. I’ll pick out my thermostat once the new HVAC unit is installed and I should have my new Hunter ceiling fans in a couple weeks. I’m still deciding on which indoor security camera I’m going to use and I want to wait on Ring to ship it’s HomeKit update before I buy into it or choose an alternative.
I guess my point is that if you are just getting into home automation the view from homekit looks really good. The only company I’m relying on is Apple and even that is only for my remote access. I’ve watched as service after service has gone out of business and old hardware became useless and don’t want to play that game.
I think you are looking at this problem wrong! The number of people who have any substantial investment in home automation is trivial! So the question is not how well homekit works with old products. It is what solutions can’t you make with homekit that you can with other products or in what way do those other products work better.
Jeff….help me out here!