I’ve previously argued that Apple Intelligence could be the biggest reason to buy an Apple smart home camera. Longer term, I think it also has the potential to create a whole new era of truly smart homes.
How long it will take before we can trust Apple Intelligence to run our homes is a whole other question! There’s no arguing with the fact that there’s a long way to go before the AI tech will be more than a public beta. But the longer-term potential does excite me …
Automation is key to smart homes
There are those who would argue that, without automation, you haven’t got a smart home – you’ve just got more convenient light switches, in the form of your voice.
I don’t quite go that far myself. To me, even manually-triggered scenes are an example of a smart home. For example, when I finish work for the day I use the voice command “Living room relax.” That switches off three lights in my home office, and sets four living room lamps to the exact brightness and color temperature I want for a cosy, relaxing feel. I think it’s hard to argue that there’s nothing smart about that type of capability.
However, I would agree that automation is at the heart of smart home technology, and am of the view that anything that can be automated should be automated.
HomeKit has a number of automation capabilities. For example, when it’s time to wake up, my bedroom blind opens about 30% of the way to allow in enough light to gently wake me without blasting me with sunlight, and opens fully when the time comes to actually get out of bed. When the last person leaves my apartment, every light is automatically switched off; when anyone returns, the entrance lights are automatically switched on.
In all, I have eight automations which run daily, not including motion sensors used to switch on kitchen and bathroom lights when anyone walks in, and off again when no movement has been detected for two minutes.
Next-level automation
All of my existing automations have one thing in common: I had to explicitly program each of them. I had to tell the Home app which devices I wanted to control, what should happen to them, and what should trigger the scene – be that time of day, sunset, state of another device or whatever.
What would be really cool is if my smart home could figure out for itself what I’d like to have happen.
I’ve already given a few examples of the sort of thing that might happen with a smart camera imbued with Apple Intelligence.
It might do things like note that your calendar shows you heading out to the gym but detect that you’re leaving the home without your gym bag, triggering a voice alert?
Perhaps it will see that your cleaner or gardener should be there on a Friday, but has entered your home unexpectedly on a Tuesday, triggering recording?
Maybe it will recognize that you are walking from your bedroom to the kitchen at night, and automatically trigger the lighting needed to light the way for you.
Beyond this would be your entire smart home system looking out for patterns of behavior and trying to figure out what could be automated for you and your family.
Perhaps it notices that you switch the kitchen Apple TV to a particular news channel when you switch on the coffee machine each morning, and could do that for you. Maybe it realizes that when you pick up your TV remote in the living room, that’s time to set the movie scene, closing the window shades and dimming the lights. Perhaps it could understand that walking into your garage around 8am on a weekday means you’re driving to work and therefore it should trigger the same sequence of events you currently do manually: opening the garage door, closing it after you drive out, checking all the doors are locked, and switching on the home security system.
Beyond that is figuring out intent
The other element of a truly smart home could be working out your intent. Developer Mate Marschalko already gave us a taste of this by effectively replacing Siri with GPT-3.
For example, he told the assistant he wanted to take a nap, and it worked out for itself that this should mean closing the window blinds in that room. Granted that was no easier than simply telling it what to do, but this is just a demo of a first step in this direction.
The longer-term goal here is to have our smart home realise what we are doing, figure out the things that should happen to facilitate our intent, and do them automatically.
Smart homes for all, not just geeks
I’ve been using smart home tech for more than a decade now, making the switch to HomeKit back in 2017. For me, it’s a very normal part of everyday life, and it still surprises me when a new visitor comments on it.
Each time they do, it’s a reminder to me that as normal as this stuff is to 9to5Mac types, it’s still kind of science-fiction for normals. As friendly as the Home app might seem to you and I, creating a scene or automation is pretty intimidating stuff to the average person. A lot of non-geeks who own smart home tech don’t go any further than using their iPhone as a remote-control.
But when the tech can configure itself, spotting patterns, discerning intent, and creating automations all by itself, that’s the point at which truly smart homes become accessible to all.
An optimist might imagine we’re two or three years away from this; a pessimist might say a decade. But that time will come, and I do think Apple will be one of the leaders in this field.
That’s my view; what about yours? Please share your thoughts in the comments.
Photo by Stephan Bechert on Unsplash
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