HomeKit dramatically improved the user-friendliness of both configuring and controlling smart homes, by allowing everything to be done though a single app.
But while the Home app was a fantastic breakthrough for its time, technology has moved on, and I think Apple needs to respond. Here are three advanced features I’d like to see in the AI age …
Natural-language programming
Even with HomeKit, setting up scenes and automations is still a relatively techy activity. You need to have the kind of brain that happily thinks in terms of logic units and flow-charts.
But as we noted earlier in the week, Samsung has just taken the next step to making smart home configuration something that anyone can do. That step is to let you use natural language to let you simply tell your smart home what it is you want it to do. An AI assistant figures out what that means in terms of your devices, and does the configuration for you.
We’ll have to see whether Samsung’s implementation is any good – we live in an age when a lot of companies say the magic phrase “AI” and do a lot of hand-waving about how wonderful it’s going to be. The reality often falls rather short of all the promises.
But regardless of how well Samsung does with this, I think the idea of it is spot-on. This is exactly how smart homes need to work if we expect normals to buy into them. For example:
At 9am weekdays, I want the lights in my office to switch on ready for me to work.
The Home app would interpret this to mean that all the lights in the room should be set to maximum brightness and a daylight color temperature of 6500K.
Ideally, there should be sufficient smarts in the system for even vaguer language:
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