is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
The holy grail of the smart home is ambient computing — technology that disappears into the background, anticipating your needs without a word or a tap. Lights turn on as you walk in, doors unlock as you approach, coffee brews before you reach the kitchen. This is the proactive home: a space that adapts to its occupants to support their comfort, health, and safety. The tools exist to create this, but today’s smart home remains complicated, unreliable, and often invasive — still a long way from truly “ambient.”
But, just as it’s changing every other game in tech, advances in artificial intelligence are a watershed moment for the smart home. The rise of AI agents that tap into language and visual models is the technology that could take us from the command-and-control era of home automation to living in the Starship Enterprise, where our every need can be served by Star Trek’s Computer (assuming that’s what you want).
We’re not anywhere near there yet, but at this week’s IFA consumer tech show in Berlin, Germany, I expect to see companies talking about how they plan to get there. While every announcement will likely feature “AI,” I’ll be looking for those with real potential to make products better, smarter, and easier to use, while keeping data local and private.
I’ve already started to see glimpses of how AI can improve the smart home. New features on my Ring security cameras, powered by Visual Language Models (VLMs), mean they can tell me what’s happening instead of just showing me. I now get a notification with a generated description of the event — such as “a brown chicken is pecking in the garden.” It’s a lot more helpful than “motion detected.”
Today, my Nest video doorbell can alert me when a package has been removed, as well as when it arrives. When I pair it with an ADT security system, the doorbell is smart enough to recognize when my neighbor’s at the door and unlock my smart lock so she can put the package inside my house.
Smart video search from companies like Ring is an example of how AI can be useful in the smart home.
Of course, some of this is machine learning, which isn’t new in the smart home. The Nest Learning Thermostat has been learning your routines and adapting your heating and cooling automatically for a decade. Alexa’s hunches feature has been telling me things I might have forgotten to do — lock the door, turn off the lights — for years now.
However, the context and awareness that new LLM- and VLM-powered assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa Plus and Google’s Gemini for the Home, could unlock has the potential to take us to the next level. If we want the vision of the Enterprise, we need Star Trek’s Computer.
What happens at home should stay at home
... continue reading