The Smart Home is Not Smart

I’ve always been a big fan of gadgets and have loved the concept of the Smart Home. In reality, the barrier to entry, complexity, and implementation make the Smart Home more trouble than it is worth. The benefits of having a Smart Home doesn’t seem to outweigh the costs associated with it.

I’ve installed many Smart Home gadgets all over my house, including Lutron Caseta light switches, Philips Hue bulbs, Echos, and Nest products. None add any real convenience to running a home.

My routines and voice commands with Alexa constantly get misinterpreted and don’t do what I want them to do. Things get disconnected and stop working.

Ultimately, it would be just as easy (and cheaper) to get up and flip a light switch or push a button on a remote control vs yelling at my voice assistant or unlocking my phone and finding the right app to control my devices.

Gizmodo recently published an article, The Smart Home Isn’t Worth It. Similarly put, the lack of connectivity or standard protocol between the vast gadgets you can install in your home is a challenge. Converting your home to a Smart Home is also a massive investment. The space is rapidly evolving, tech quickly becomes obsolete.

Several big-name companies (Apple, Google, Amazon, to name a few) are standardizing a protocol called Matter that will make connectivity easier between devices from different companies.

Whatever the case, the Smart Home currently trades one somewhat inconvenient interface (ex: a light switch) for a more inconvenient interface (an app buried on your phone, or an automated routine that often doesn’t work). That’s not really “Smart”.

The Smart Home should do what it promises–intelligently automate my home in a way that’s convenient for me and easy to set up. That’s not possible right now. Not really.

Hopefully, the Matter protocol will make this happen. Until then, I consider investing money into a Smart Home to be a waste.