These new innovations make the smart home easier to control and simpler to configure.

Smart connected devices like lights, locks, shades, thermostats, robot vacuums, and security cameras can make your home more comfortable, safer, and sometimes more fun. But even if you want to connect everything in your home, there are two things that make the smart home a tough sell for many households. You need your phone to control things 80 percent of the time, and getting all of these devices to work together in harmony in the smart home through routines and automations is often confusing and complicated.

Fortunately, there's finally real push to solve both of these challenges through more and better interfaces for smart home control and with clever uses of generative ai that make device automation as easy as typing whatever you want.

While voice control and smart displays have brought about a more democratic way of controlling devices in the home, it's often still faster and more reliable to control lights, curtains, locks and scenes from your phone thanks to clunky nomenclature and a underpowered hardware. This is a problem because it means that one person in the household ends up owning all the connected things (via a folder of dozens of separate apps, but that's another problem), and everyone else ends up living in a semi-authoritarian state. . under the control of said person and their smartphone.

As I have said many times before, we need more and better interfaces to control devices. From ones that blend into your home, like the super-cool Mui Board (a piece of wood that's also a touchscreen), to ones that appear only when needed, like Samsung's Ballie home robot with its roving projection screen. , smart home control should be intuitive and accessible to everyone. You know, like the light switch, only better.

While the likelihood of any of these devices finding their way into your home is slim to none, the ideas are good and I hope we see more like them soon. However, there was one innovative new interface that I saw everywhere at CES 2024 that you can actually use today: the map view.

All the big tech companies at CES this year showed off new map-based interfaces for interacting with smart home devices across their platforms, including LG, Samsung, Amazon and even smaller players like TP-Link's Tapo. These interfaces present a 3D map view of your home with your connected devices placed throughout, and you can simply point and tap to control those devices.

Put this on a community tablet (Amazon is bringing Map View to its new Echo Hub smart display and Tapo to its iPad app) or the screen of a smart refrigerator, and controlling that specific smart light next to the couch becomes much easier for the uninitiated than checking a list of devices on a smartphone app or guessing the name when you ask an assistant to voice that turns it on.

However, if you put the map view on a TV, it suddenly looks even more familiar to everyone in the house. Samsung's Map View works on your TV today, and LG likely does too, either using its ThinQ platform or perhaps now that all LG TVs can be Google Home hubs, we'll see Google move into this space also. It's obviously something Amazon could easily do with its Fire TV. Now, anyone in a home can pick up a TV remote and easily control lights, thermostats, curtains, or a camera feed with just a point and click.

I saw a demo of Samsung's SmartThings Map View on a Samsung TV at CES using a remote, and it reminded me of the much-missed Logitech Harmony remote. Map View gives you a simple way to point and control any device in your home from the comfort of your couch without the need for additional hardware.

Many of us still prefer physical buttons to control our homes, and that's where the smart button (aka scene controller) is starting to gain some traction as a good solution for smart home control. It's the light switch, evolved.

A smart button is generally a wireless device that can be mounted on the wall to look like a switch or used as a handheld or tabletop device. Instead of controlling a single circuit like a switch would or a single device like a traditional infrared remote would, smart buttons can be programmed to control any number of devices or scenes connected to it.

With the arrival of the new Matter smart home standard, many of these smart buttons have the potential to become infinitely more useful, as you can connect lights, locks, curtains, robotic vacuums, thermostats, and more from different manufacturers and control them all with a push. .

flic, to that, All, and others have developed smart buttons that support or should soon support Matter. However, the only one of the big four Matter platforms that supports buttons right now is the Apple Home. Samsung SmartThings, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home say they're working on adding it, but none have provided a timeline for when Matter button support might arrive.

At CES, smart lighting company GE Cync showed off a new smart button prototype that will work with Matter. Inspired by the high-end scene controllers you can find in professionally installed systems managed by its parent company, Savant, the GE Cync Scene Controller is designed to control groups of lights or scenes from each button. With Matter, you can connect lights and devices from any Matter-compatible manufacturer.

Nanoleaf unveiled its Sense Plus smart wireless switch, which debuted at CES last year but now says it will arrive this summer. With six assignable buttons, you should be able to use them to control Nanoleaf smart bulbs directly over a local Thread connection or link the buttons to a smart scene from any Matter-compatible platform to control multiple devices with the press of a button.

The biggest problem with smart buttons is remembering which button controls which scene, group of lights, or other devices. Some, like Onvis, with its 5 key smart switch, solve this problem with stickers that look a little sloppy. Leviton allows you to order engraved buttons for the scenes of him on his wired scene controllerbut this is still a problem with smart buttons.

Linxura has an ingenious solution: with a click wheel around an e-paper screen, the $100 Linxura Smart Controller It can display four devices at once, including lights, curtains, locks and fans, so you can easily switch between them and click to control them. It currently supports IFTTT, Alexa and Google, and Matter support will arrive in the second quarter via a firmware update, according to the company.

All this talk about control illustrates that today's smart home still relies heavily on remote control. While technologies like RF sensing are making great strides, the ambient smart home that understands context (and can know when to turn on this light and how brightly based on who is in the room and where) is still a long way off.

No, I don't think ai-powered home robots are the solution here: LG's ai Agent robot it unveiled at CES felt more overbearing than helpful, and Samsung's Ballie's best trick was its display screen. projection. But the context that connected devices can provide in our home will be key. LG says it is now prepared to use what it calls “real-time life data” collected from its 7 billion connected devices in people's homes to Learn how you use your home and react more intuitively. (With your permission).

Today, however, creating more complex automations and scenes that make the smart home feel more magical is becoming easier thanks to generative ai. At CES, smart home companies Govee and Aqara demonstrated how they use generative ai to help users create and execute routines that would have been complicated and time-consuming to set up on their own.

Now, with his ai lighting botYou can tell the Govee app that you want “a Barbie Dreamhouse-inspired effect,” and instead of having to individually go through and program each Govee smart light you have in various shades of pink, the Govee robot will do it for you.

Aqara is also adding a new Home Copilot to its smart home platform. At first, Home Copilot will be a chatbot in the Aqara app that understands natural language, so you can ask it to set up an automation that turns off the lights at 10 pm, closes the doors, and lowers all the curtains.

Ultimately, Aqara says Home Copilot will be able to analyze usage patterns in an Aqara home and proactively suggest custom automations, including custom plans for energy-saving automation. With Aqara opening its platform to third-party Matter devices through its new M3 hub, this could be a very powerful tool.

Aqara also showed off a concept device at its booth that allows you to talk directly to Home Copilot. Wireless voice controllers have a microphone that only activates when you pick them up.

ai is not new to the smart home. ai/”>Google Home and Amazon Alexa have been slowly incorporating it into their platforms at various levels, and machine learning has been powering smart home security cameras for a while now. But the power of generative ai looks poised to bring about a sea change in the smart home that will make it easier to use and feel smarter overall. Combined with the interoperability that Matter is (slowly) bringing to the space, I'm excited to see the smart home enter this new era.