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.
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Last week, Amazon and Google kick-started what could be the next chapter of the smart home. Their new voice assistants, Alexa Plus and Gemini for Home, have been rebuilt from the ground up on generative AI and large language models to be more conversational, understand context, and take actions. This marks the biggest shift in home control since the companies launched their original smart speakers over a decade ago.
In the years since, smart home adoption has stalled — because it’s complicated and confusing, and the value isn’t always clear. Google and Amazon are betting on this new wave of AI-powered intelligence to deliver a smarter, simpler, more capable smart home. After spending the last week speaking with folks at both companies and seeing their new hardware and software strategies, I’m hopeful. But I see at least three major hurdles: reliability, speed, and proving it’s worth paying for.
How generative AI could finally make the smart home smart
While you might think of generative AI as creating text and images, it can also be used to analyze data collected from a home to identify patterns and interpret context. This can provide the intelligence layer the smart home needs to move us from the command-and-control world we’ve been stuck in toward the promised land of ambient computing. With this upgrade, in theory, your home can respond and react proactively to situations, without you needing to spend hours fiddling with apps, setting up automations, or grappling with the exact phrasing required by a voice assistant.
I see three major hurdles: reliability, speed, and proving it’s worth paying for.
“The biggest gap we’ve had in the last decade is that intelligence layer,” Google Home’s Anish Kattukaran tells me, adding that the command-centric nature of the current Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri has been a major limitation for the smart home. “As an industry, we solved that with a lot of hard-coding, a lot of if-this, then-that statements.” But with generative AI and LLMs, the assistants can become that intelligence layer that we can more easily interact with, he says. “This is undoubtedly an inflection point.”
Last week, Google announced a new smart speaker and launched new Nest cameras, which it says are optimized for Gemini. Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge
The new AI-powered capabilities primarily focus on a smart home assistant that can understand and use natural language, as well as comprehend, generate, and summarize descriptions of events within and around your home. The features are being added slowly, as part of a new opt-in early access program in the US and several other countries.
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