So, I did a walk through today on a potential take over. A woman bought a home in one of the high end clubs in the area, and it has a small one panel LiteTouch system that has some issues. We started trying to gently remove the bandaid, to ease the owner into the cost issue. Her reaction was “but can’t I just replace all the light bulbs and then just use Alexa? Someone told me I could do that”. I barely stopped myself from saying “then what are we doing here?” I managed to reform the words just before they came out into “I have 3 echos in my home. Good luck with that”.

This is just going to get worse isn’t it?

Yes, Yes it is. I don't have all day to educate people.

Why can't I just get bluetooth outdoor speakers hung outside?

I actually saw a high end home where the homeowner had the electrician put outlets in the ceiling for Sonos rear speakers.

We did exactly this in a 1920s home, more like palace, with the difference that the outlets were in wall niches for the surround speakers. The physical difficulty of running speaker wires would have been a nightmare.

I walked (and subseqently ran screaming) from a house that had that too.

"Why do they need all that wire, everything is wireless these days"
- Every general contractor

The thing that would bother me is they can turn on your microphone on your phone and listen in, they track your internet usage and everything you do online. Now you're putting in a device that is listening for you 24/7?

No they're not going to be listening in right??

If they do at our house they are going to be very bored.

Frederick

My wife swears that bitch is listening. They must have done a firmware update, but for a while, couple times a night when nothing even close to Alexa was said’ the echo would chime in “I’m sorry, I can’t understand your request”. LOL

At some point, someone is going to provide a local speech recognition engine with modern, neural network algorithms. Currently the folks who could do it aren't probably interested, because they want to tie you to their online services. Anyone who does it will have to be someone not beholden to that business model. But it's obviously doable at this point. The question is whether anyone thinks that it's worth the investment to do it.

It would clearly take over the automation market in terms of providing voice control, because installers would get out of all of the issues involved in integrating cloud based SR systems to automation systems. It's pretty messy. But, beyond that, I'm not sure if they could find enough applications for it to justify doing.

We support the Echo, and we also have a local SR solution. But our local solution uses previous generation SR technology because that's all that is available for local use right now, at least in any commercially ready sort of way (i.e. not a doctoral thesis experiment.) So the recognition isn't as good for our local solution. The advantage is that it's all local and that, because it's under our control, it automatically can read our room/device configuration and know what devices are in what rooms and build up the appropriate control grammar on the fly and it knows which mics are in which rooms and therefore what devices the commands apply to and so forth, which is a huge advantage. It makes setting up voice control so much easier (and a voice control that adapts easily to system configuration changes.)

If someone would just provide us with a cutting edge, all local SR solution, we could get the best of both worlds. But no one probably cares about us off in our non-commodity automation world. The commodity market will just stick the simplistic control offered by things like the Echo outside of integration into a serious automation system. And the non-commodity market won't provide sufficient numbers to entice a company big enough to do the work to do the work.

I could be wrong, and hopefully I am, but probably not.

BTW, ultimately the REAL game changer (and scary bit) will be when voice recognition comes along and gets really solid. Then, we not only know what was said, but who said it. This opens the door for personalized voice control, and also for allowing administrative type tasks to be done via voice control, which currently isn't possible (or not advisable) because there's no way to limit access to those commands.

OTOH, it takes the spying on your customers potential three or four notches higher. VR would almost certainly imply an ability to guess age and sex pretty accurately, and even more since any such system would likely include the ability to configure "this voice is Sally", "this voice is Bob", and here is some nice information about Sally and Bob that will help you collect actionable data on them to maximum potential.

What the hell were you doing to your wife at those times?

I repeat: On a live radio show the other day, the host said quite loudly "Seriously, we..." and you could hear Siri say "I'm sorry, I can't help you with that" or some other response that PROVES she misheard "seriously."

Then there's the article the other day about the Amazon delivery service using an in-house camera and an electronically controlled lock. The homeowner is quite sanguine, saying "the camera is only turned on when they're making a delivery." Right.

This is a huge problem right now. The answer is "yes you can just use Alexa to turn on lights...but the lighting system is $50k".

If you live in a studio apartment with just lamps then yeah...you can do lighting control for $500.

We’ve been married for 15 years. Nothing

Isn’t everything going wireless anyway?