If you’re a smart-home nerd like me, chances are you use a whole bunch of apps on your phone or tablet to control lights, door locks, cameras and cooking devices. It can feel overwhelming at times, and while efforts like HomeKit are supposed to help by presenting a single hero app to control your smart home, the reality is there are just too many incompatible platforms out there to make things work together smoothly.
All of which has made Amazon’s Alexa a breath of fresh air in smart homes over the past couple years. Instead of trying to create an entirely new platform and force users to use a specific app, the company instead opted to let everyone do something most of us feel comfortable doing: talk.
The end result is Alexa has become a phenomenon, as companies rush to integrate their connected devices and consumers adopt Echos and other Alexa-enabled devices at a rapid pace. But as popular as the Echo has been, there are still only roughly 10 million in homes today with Amazon’s voice-assisted speaker. While that’s no doubt popular, it’s certainly not ubiquitous, which leaves many folks with connected devices are still left resorting to pulling out the app to control their device.
So imagine instead if you could control your smart home with a chat program like Facebook Messenger or the native texting app on your phone? With Facebook Messenger on billions of phones and text messaging standardized and completely ubiquitous, wouldn’t it make sense to let you talk with your things with a chat system?
The answer is yes, which is why Mark Zuckerberg did just that when we created his smart home artificial intelligence system. But if you think it’s just billionaires working on side projects who are creating smart home interfaces with chat, think again. ChefSteps, a smart kitchen startup, released a chatbot for its sous vide cooking circulator last month, and now a startup by the name of Unified Inbox has created a texting AI system that companies like Bosch and Samsung are looking to integrate with their products.
If you’re like me, your first thought is chatting with your things via a messaging app is a little weird. But after cooking a steak with Facebook Messenger, I realized that it’s just as intuitive as barking commands to my Alexa and, in some cases, a more information-rich format. For example, the Joule Messenger chatbot was able to show me what my steak should look like when it’s done and give me fairly detailed information about cooking the steak. I don’t care how good Alexa becomes at describing things because, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.
While we likely won’t see chatbots become the default interface for our connected things this year, I predict chat systems will become an important way in which we talk to our things as more companies embrace was has become almost second nature for many of us in today’s world: chatting via the the written word on our phones.
Now, if we could just figure out what the emoji would be for “turn my lights off at night.”
