Smart Homes: virtual agents on the rise

By Paul Ridgewell

What is preventing the ‘smart home’ from going mainstream? Why is it that, despite the sector’s growing ubiquity in the media, few of us still are checking our home surveillance cameras before settling down to sleep, or setting the day’s lighting via an app to come on when we wake up?
 
Is it a case of lack of utility – is it that consumers simply do not yet see the need for smart home devices? Is the price tag too high for what are, let’s face it, hardly vital tools to help us get through the day? Or are security concerns stopping consumers from allowing smart home devices to transmit unknown amounts of data to unknown sources for unknown purposes?
 
It’s probably a combination of all three, added to the fact that the sector is still in its early phase and many of the products currently on the market lack sufficient ease of use. However, that may be about to change with Google’s recent product announcements and emerging competition to Amazon’s Echo.
 
Google’s had something of a chequered past in the smart home. Its Android@Home software framework (which was to enable all kinds of devices – from light bulbs to thermostats to washing machines – to connect to a home gateway controlled by Android devices) was first announced in 2011, but was later abandoned.
 
Google then acquired Nest Labs for $3.2b in early 2014, and Nest itself paid $555m for video monitoring and security firm Dropcam a few months later. Nest’s product range now comprises an app-enabled smart thermostat (Nest Thermostat), a home security camera (Nest Cam) and a fancy smoke alarm (Nest Protect). However, after over two years in the Google stable, the Nest range remains somewhat limited with no new product releases, the retirement of the Revolv controller in May and a wave of recent employee defections, particularly from Dropcam, suggesting a somewhat dysfunctional corporate environment.
 
But Google seems ready now to step up a gear with a number of announcements coming out of its Google I/O developer conference this month. First off, it’s making progress on connectivity with the wider IoT sector through the open sourcing of Nest’s Thread protocol, which paves the way for better connectivity between IoT devices from different manufacturers, as well as between devices and the cloud. This puts Google in competition mainly with the open Amazon Alexa and Samsung SmartThings platforms, rather than with the more closed Apple HomeKit environment. Google also announced a suite of integrations with third-party products, software and services.
 
But potentially the biggest news came with the announcement of the Google Home virtual agent, to be launched “later this year” as a direct competitor to Amazon’s Alexa. Google Home will, on command, be able to carry out tasks such as playing a song, setting a timer for the oven and turning on lights. It will also be able to control smart home products, starting with Nest, as well as integrating with other devices using the Google Cast wireless communication protocol.
 
Whether Google is too late to the game is, at this point, anyone’s guess. Amazon has already sold some three million of its Alexa-enabled Echo wireless speaker and voice devices, and is adding new functionality at a rapid pace, enabling it to work with almost any company that utilises its open source API. Apple is also reportedly working on a Siri-powered competitor to Amazon Echo, as well as opening Siri up to third-party apps. For its part, Samsung’s SmartThings claims that its platform enables users to connect with hundreds of compatible smart devices.
 
But while competition between the tech giants in the smart home market is certainly intensifying, there is still the sense of a lack of complete openness, and the suspicion that vendors remain committed to locking users into their own silos. There are also very significant security hurdles that need to be overcome. For example, network security firm Kaspersky recently made it clear that the smart home remains far from secure. It demonstrated, among other horrors, a smart coffee maker device that could expose the user's Wi-Fi password, enabling hackers to then spy on the home’s occupants.
 
Also, while Apple’s HomeKit platform is believed to impose strict security and encryption requirements on device makers, researchers at the University of Michigan recently uncovered multiple design flaws in the SmartThings platform, prompting Samsung to update its security documentation for developers. And while Amazon Echo is regarded by the security establishment as having no obvious backdoors, the fact that it has difficulty distinguishing between different voices means that anyone with access to the virtual agent also has access to all of its linked accounts. Of course, it’s too soon to comment on Google Home’s security procedures, but given the trust we are increasingly placing in such products it is increasingly clear that all manufacturers need to make security a high priority.