Smart Home Assistant
#Podcast 35: Why are Smart Homes so Dumb?
November 29th, 2024This is the House Alexa Built
October 5th, 2018
The Smart Home Was Supposed to Be Simple But…
The smart home promised to make our lives more straightforward. To automatically set lights and environmental controls to your exact preferences, to alert you of visitors or intruders, even to remember your shopping list and send it to your mobile phone. In reality, however, the smart home has become a minefield of complexity and compatibility […]
Would you Live in a Smart Home Built by Amazon, Apple or Google?
Through product development and acquisition retail colossus Amazon now provides consumers with almost every element of the smart home, aside from the bricks and mortar itself. This situation led customer experience futurist, keynote speaker and author, Blake Morgan to ask, “would it make sense that Amazon take it to the next level and simply start […]
Amazon Underlines Ambitions to Dominate the Smart Home with Latest Acquisition
In 2013, during episode nine in the fifth season of entrepreneurial reality TV series Shark Tank (a show like Dragon’s Den for our UK readers), James Siminoff pitched his smart doorbell invention ‘DoorBot’ to the show’s panel of experienced investors. During the pitch, Siminoff sought a $700,000 investment for a 10% stake in DoorBot, valuing […]
“Alexa, Would You Like To Go To Work With Me Today?”
Virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri or Google Home, have become an increasingly common sight in homes across the world through smart speakers. Like cyber personal assistants they are connecting with residential systems, such as lighting and thermostats, to automate and simplify the way we run our homes. These assistants have also […]
Who Is The Internet Of Things Actually For?
“There is a clear philosophical position, even a worldview, behind [the internet of things]: that the world is in principle perfectly knowable, its contents enumerable and their relations capable of being meaningfully encoded in a technical system, without bias or distortion,’ highlights Adam Greenfield in his book entitled ‘Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life’. […]
The Need for “Realness” in our Smart Cities and Buildings
“In a digital age in which everything is available everywhere all the time, where every experience can be delivered electronically and every technology of communication has been puréed into the same universal flow of infinitely reproducible 0s and 1s, the hottest growth is in the market for things: finite, imperfect, irreducibly physical. Rather like human […]
Giving the Internet of Things a Voice
“I think the internet of things (IoT) means many different things to many people. Much of the time it’s no different to what we used to call machine-to-machine; it’s largely rebranding for something that never quite achieved its potential,” claims technology evangelist, serial entrepreneur and developer, Nick Hunn. Hunn is Chief Technology Officer at, wireless […]
Audio: Forget The Internet Of Things… Let’s Consider The Internet Of Voice!
Here is the Audio Stream from our 3rd Free Webinar in the 2017 Smart Buildings Series, sponsored by Project Haystack. Forget The Internet Of Things… Let’s Consider The Internet Of Voice! This was an in-depth discussion with Nick Hunn, CTO at WiFore about how Voice Recognition may take the Internet of Things in a different […]