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How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

arstechnica.com

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Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#111

Post by kps »

jpdb wrote: post #68
shellfishgene wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the matter stuff more expensive, or about the same? There seem to be not that many products yet?

Relatively the same price, I'd say. But there's definitely not they many products out yet so maybe that will change. I think the biggest difference in price I saw was from my Z-Wave blinds versus Thread / Matter ones. However, the overwhelming majority of the cost for that is the blinds themselves so it's probably not the best comparison.

I don't think Matter will add to price; for many devices, I suspect the opposite. The open-source Matter implementation (disclosure: I worked on bits of it) has wide support from silicon vendors. JoeBulbCo will basically be able to pick from a selection of high-volume ICs, run ‘make’, and ship it. JoeBulbCo competes on how good — or how cheap — their bulb is.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#112

Post by jon-wood »

rootusrootus wrote: post #85
jon-wood wrote: post #60

It appears we're doing "smart home" again, so its time for my regular plea to stop calling shitty light switches automation. Automation is when you don't have to think about what state devices are in, and while it takes some tinkering can be achieved using something like Home Assistant to bridge various different devices together. Each room in my house has Hue bulbs in all the light sockets, and sensors which can det…

Are you getting anything out of the Hue dependency other than the color?

In some cases I'm not even getting colour, quite a few of my bulbs are cheaper ones that only allow colour temperature to be controlled. Mostly I'm using Hue because its where I started, so I'm fairly bought into that ecosystem - I do like that the Hue hubs will still work even without an internet connection though. At some point I'll bite the bullet and migrate all my bulbs over to pairing with the Zigbee dongle attached to my Home Assistant server.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#113

Post by jon-wood »

shellfishgene wrote: post #78
jon-wood wrote: post #60

It appears we're doing "smart home" again, so its time for my regular plea to stop calling shitty light switches automation. Automation is when you don't have to think about what state devices are in, and while it takes some tinkering can be achieved using something like Home Assistant to bridge various different devices together. Each room in my house has Hue bulbs in all the light sockets, and sensors which can det…

Have you tried any of the 24 Ghz/mmWave presence sensors which supposedly don't have the lack of movement problem?

Somewhere deep on my todo list is building a grid of ESP32s around the place reporting BLE signal strengths to a central node which can then do triangulation to work out where people are based on devices they typically carry with them (I for example am almost always wearing an Apple Watch, and carrying my phone).

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#114

Post by jon-wood »

cheeko1234 wrote: post #79
jon-wood wrote: post #60

It appears we're doing "smart home" again, so its time for my regular plea to stop calling shitty light switches automation. Automation is when you don't have to think about what state devices are in, and while it takes some tinkering can be achieved using something like Home Assistant to bridge various different devices together. Each room in my house has Hue bulbs in all the light sockets, and sensors which can det…

I have home assistant running with quite a few esp32's running esphome with random sensors/bulbs scattered around the house. My question is, what do you use the manage the automations? Do you use the native home assistant automation, or node-red, etc? I've even looked a bit into Room assistant[0] [0] https://www.room-assistant.io/guide/#how-it-works

Its all the built in automation UI in Home Assistant, but with fairly heavy use of scripts and scenes to encapsulate behaviour. Most automations are just a series of conditionals that then call out to a script for the smart bits.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#115

Post by tzs »

rootusrootus wrote: post #88
ocharles wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think voice is a fine interface for a lot of smart home things. If I'm watching TV and want the lights on/off, I don't want: * To have to reach for my phone * To have a tablet mounted within reach (that's more clutter) * To have to get up to the light switch/nearest controller. This sounds lazy but that is literally the point of all this stuff - to make things convenient. Likewise, if I'm in the kitchen and want to…

It is convenient. I ultimately turned it off because the kids found it very convenient, too. Not to control their own lights, mind you. I had to turn off Echo integration altogether for the same reason. Took them 2 minutes to figure out they could command Alexa to turn off the lights in someone else's room. Even though Alexa recognizes them as different people and has the room lights assigned to their respective room…

My house seems designed for such pranks, no smart things required. For some unfathomable reason the switch for the main bathroom is outside the bathroom. If you are in the bathroom with the door closed anyone else can flip the switch and likely get clean away before you can get off the toilet and open the door.

I've heard of a great light flipping prank that supposedly happened at Caltech a few years before I was there. There was a row of rooms overlooking a courtyard. Each had a window on the courtyard. At the end of the row was a bathroom, also with a window on the courtyard.

Some pranksters once when the student in the room next to the bathroom was out rewired his switch and the bathroom switch so the each switch controlled both rooms.

Then they sat in the courtyard watching that night. He got home, they saw his light (and the bathroom light) go on as he got ready for bed, then go out as he went to sleep.

A little while later someone went to use the bathroom. They turned on both lights.

That woke the sleeping guy, who got up and turned the lights back off and went back to bad. The people in the courtyard heard an annoyed yell from the bathroom, where the occupant was apparently sitting on the toilet.

Toilet guy went and turned the lights back on. That woke up sleeping guy, who they heard swear, and he got up and turned the lights off.

Toilet guy as faster this time, and got the lights back on before sleeping guy reached bed.

What then happened was the lights alternated on and off at an increasing frequency until finally both people went out to the hall to try to see if there was a clue there and they figured out what was going on.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#116

Post by Steltek »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #110
terinjokes wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want a dimmable light in a room, you're going to have to buy a light that supports dimming. That's true for a smart bulb or a dumb bulb.

Yeah, and if you already have dumb LED lights in your apartment that are not dimmable? Now you have to swap out the switches and the lights. With this hassle, you might as well just skip swapping the switches and just jump to smart lights directly.

Smart switches+dumb lights are far superior to dumb switches+smart lights. Why go to all that effort and money for a poor outcome?

A smart switch:

- Allows for anyone to interact with the light without apps/voice/whatever. You just hit the switch.

- Fails gracefully. If the controller dies, it's still a switch.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#117

Post by Steltek »

ontarionick wrote: post #58
autoexec wrote: post #52

The smartest house doesn't hand out the details of your life to 3rd parties or let contractors hear you having sex. We need more options for privacy respecting self-hosted systems that people don't have to design/create themselves. Some home automation tech is pretty nice, but its not worth paying for it forever with the data/privacy being given up, and in the inevitable consequences of having that data used against…

Setup Home Assistant, and only get devices that are 100% local control! There are fairly reasonable options for this. I have a couple devices/services where I haven't been able to find good local only or where I find utility in the cloud connectedness, but that's very much the exception than the rule.

I want a cheap home smart camera that offer good local control. It seems like the premium jump from Wyze is like $100 per camera.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#118

Post by bretto13 »

tuananh wrote: post #36

sensors is the key to an "actual" smart home. sensors along with lots of automation rules will make the home works for you, instead of requiring you to shout at the assistant.

Motion and door sensors tied to lights that come on and adjust with light intensity and time of day is the best automation I've setup. It's so nice to walk into a dark room and have the lights turn on (without blinding you), then turn off when you're gone. Much better than fiddling with dimmers.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#119

Post by kab0b »

leoedin wrote: post #6

I've been wanting a "house tablet" for a while - something to interact with my (app only) heating controls and play music on spotify. Has anyone found an acceptable setup? I had an old Android tablet permanently wall mounted for a while, but it was too slow (single core). I'd love an "appliance" style android tablet - but these don't seem to exist.

I haven't done the touchscreen side of it, but have been thinking about switching to touch screen, currently my setup is just a display for infomation.

I'm currently running a raspberry pi with a 15" portable monitor (Here is one that is actually a touchscreen as well, mine aren't. https://www.amazon.com/ADPOP-Portable-15-6-External-Extender...)

For software I'm using magic-mirror, and then use that to link into my calendar, Home-assistant, weather etc. There are some input modules that can be added, so that might enable some touch-features.

I'm just renting right now, so I just have the Pi mounted in a case by the plug with some of those 3M picture frame strips and run the HDMI to the monitor (also mounted with picture frame strips) hidden in a track, If I owned, I'd bring the plug up behind the monitor, and flush the PI in wall and then wrap the monitor around a frame or something.

Re: How to control your smart home without yelling at a dumb voice assistant

#120

Post by eteos »

Maybe it's different with Alexa (I use Google Home), but I disagree with the premise of the article. Firstly, for a product that you use every day I don't see it as much effort to learn to say the right commands. Once you know it, you don't unlearn it. I also have the Google Hub, and an app for controlling the lightning (Phillips Hue), but I rarely interact with those, since via that route it takes more steps and more time to get what I want.
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