When Will Your Smart Home Program Itself?

Think about the ultimate promise of the smart home: a home that does what you want, when you want, and does it all automatically. The smart home of our dreams is not just a building where we live (and now work), but it’s also a helpful partner in our everyday lives that makes things easier and better.

In an ideal world, the truly smart home will be a system that programs itself based on some high-level desires you provide – all in an effort to become more helpful and more secure, while also providing a healthier environment for its occupants. You couldn’t ask for much more than that! Unfortunately, that is decidedly not what we have today.

In fact, I’d argue that we haven’t come much farther along than the old VCR in terms of how labor-intensive our home technology is. Think about that VHS (or Betamax) recorder you had sitting under the TV decades ago: the clock was always blinking 12:00 because it was such a pain to set, so then you couldn’t set a timed recording, which really limited the functionality of the whole thing.

It was difficult to use, and it didn’t deliver its full promise. Sound familiar? Today we have to subject ourselves to tasks that are more difficult than setting a VCR clock in order to have a smart home. It’s a jumbled mess of devices and apps that don’t work together, and we’re expected to know how to set up each one. So how do we advance beyond the VCR programming problem? How can the home itself take on more of this burden?

Exploring the Space

For starters, if your home doesn’t know where rooms are, it can’t know what you want it to do. You want to tell your home to turn on the lights in the dining room? It can’t do that if it doesn’t even know where the dining room is. That’s why a capability called spatial understanding absolutely critical to getting all of this great technology to work together, so the smart home can program itself – and achieve our ultimate vision of being a helpful partner that makes our lives better.

A home robot like the Roomba is perfect for this mission. It is constantly learning about the spatial environment of the home – something other devices do not do. While the robot vacuum is moving around your home cleaning the floors, it’s also creating a real-time map of the space, including other smart devices and furniture.

With the context of “knowing where things are,” we can then start elevating the level of collaboration between the home and the homeowner. Because the robot is able to recognize and map the location of key objects, you can tell your home what to do – like clean around the kitchen table – and it does it! This ability to interact with your devices is what transforms the smart home into an intelligent home.

Once we start establishing this detailed map of the space, we open the possibility that Roomba can find and add any number of devices to the network: lights, thermostats, security systems – whatever. Then the home can then schedule automations that take cues from other smart devices in the home (like a connected door lock locking) and essentially know that when the house is empty it’s a good time to start cleaning. Beyond convenience, these types of capabilities will also be critical to extending independent living as people get older, another benefit of the smart home.

This is the type of experience consumers are demanding in their smart home. They don’t want a clunky, cumbersome process that’s reminiscent of struggling to program the VCR. They want the equivalent of a supercharged DVR, in-home technology that knows just what you like and serves it up to you automatically. This is the level of service technology companies will need to provide if they want to create a smart home franchise that their customers never want to leave.

As people continue to spend more time at home – now so often working and living in the same place – they’re going to want greater convenience, efficiency and safety from that environment. There has never been a better time for technology companies to step up and make the truly smart home a reality, and I think we’ll be seeing significant steps in that direction in the months ahead.

What do you want in your smart home? What would make it feel like an intelligent partner in your life?

For more on robotics, innovation and the future of the smart home, follow me on Twitter @colinangle.