Technology

Tesla, believe it or not, is doing the ai thing right.

1. There’s always a control: you may not like touch screen in your car but it’s always there so you’re not forced to use voice assistant.
2. The standard voice assistant still works the same as it ever did
3. AI voice assistant is separate that you can choose to use or not. When it was new, it was not allowed to control anything but that is gradually being phased in as it works.

When the ai first came out all it could do is hold a conversation, and was amusingly snarky. Now it can set a destination, but is still limited compared to standard voice assistant

If a home automation product isn't self hosted, it can fuck right off

A 100% fully automated smart home is a fucking bad idea. Might as well sign your death certificates. Our family had one such system (not Alexa) and it controlled the whole thing. Yes, we should have researched better but the sellers were really convincing. Anyway there was a malfunction and it trips multiple breakers in our house. Our rhought at the time was to get the fuck out and called the electricians. Guess what? The doors refuse to open properly, so we had to climb over....

If anyone really really really wants a smart home, please only assign the system for mundane tasks like music, lightings. Dont do it for security stuff like doors, cameras.

Or just dont install one, even better.

Quote: "This morning, I asked my Alexa-enabled Bosch coffee machine to make me a coffee. Instead of running my routine, it told me it couldn’t do that. Ever since I upgraded to Alexa Plus, Amazon’s generative-AI-powered voice assistant, it has failed to reliably run my coffee routine, coming up with a different excuse almost every time I ask."

Why? Seriosly! The author spent XXX kWh energy running AI because is lazy to switch ON damn coffie machine?

If anyone wants privacy while maintaing a smart home, then Home Assistant is the solution. Its not adopted widely because it has a learning curve and it needs a bit (or a lot) poking around to make it work. It also has a voice assistant that is not AI powered ( but it could be supplemented by a local LLM if you really want to). A big rabit hole if anyone is interested to go to.

Call me old fashioned. But when I press the brew button on my coffee machine, it works every time. No internet, apps, or 'smarts' required. Just consistent quality.

The real issue with smart home adoption has been proprietary formats all vying for dominance and fragmenting the market. I don't think AI has changed much.

Matter (and Thread) are a huge change to the SmartHome landscape because they're open protocols and have well-documented standards - and they've finally begun appearing in big manufacturer's line-ups such as IKEA.

Once their availability spreads I suspect a lot more people will get into running their own local (eg HomeAssistant) smart home because they won't have to do the 'ok do I need z-wave or ZigBee or HomeKit or IFTTT or Hue or Tuya or.... you know what, fuck this'. It'll all be the same protocol and communications and config & debug will be much easier.

AI sucks but a smart home can be actually nice if set up well

I just want my smart home fully or semi fully airlocked on my lan

Alexa+ is a lobotomized version of the original. Since the "upgrade", a simple request for a wholesome sesame street clip results in playing the beezleblocks music video (which starts with a girl dead in a bathtub full of water holding a cinder block) - true story.

"Alexa, please find local pediatric therapists"

I’m so glad my wife & I never got sucked into using things like Alexa.

I'm not anti technology, but it sounds like the author's desire to use these fancy new toys made their life worse. Congratulations?

Like, if you wanna play music, click the tablet. If you wanna turn on the light, touch the button. It's so amazingly efficient. Really, three seconds, works every time.

So yeah, you could use voice commands, but those are slower and (obviously, the article explains) highly error prone. In other words, it's a worse solution than the traditional method.

Of course that's not always true. Some people can't walk easily, for example. And some use cases are complicated enough where a single button push doesn't work. But most of us aren't in these special situations.

So, you can buy the new toy, but don't pretend you're making life better. Be honest: you are either tinkering or bragging. And that's OK, no worries either way.

We haven't gone whole-hog into home automation, except for a zone-heating and hot-water controller. In a part of the world with winter, that makes a big difference. The controller I use has a web-based but also offers a nice API. Another good thing about it is that it includes a way to know when we're in or out of the house, based on mobile phone detection. So I wrote some scripts to manage the system in a nicer way than having a big bunch of static profiles. One of the reasons it works well is that none of it's AI. Just some event detection and use of the output of one-time runs of optimization algorithms based on our utility provider's pricing. It's less flaky than I am about controlling the heating zones, so it's cut my gas bill by another 10% over the 30% savings we got from installing the controller and running it on a timer with occasional manual intervention.

So the API runs on the controller provider's website, but they don't sell our data (at least they claim not to), and the script that invokes the API lives on an otherwise retired netbook on our home LAN. Not 100% private, but not unduly intrusive either. The only downside is that, if the internet goes tits-up, the only option is manual override (which isn't too bad).

The approach I'm using is also what I'll do if I ever feel motivated to install solar (which is useful but not optimal in the country we live in, and the location of our house).

Or, you could just get up and flip the damn switch. And if you want it warmer turn up the thermostat. This is not hard.