Speak up, smart home
Your home is becoming a better listener
“Go to sleep!” you yell from across the room. The lights turn off, curtains lower, door locks, all instantly without moving a finger. Welcome to your smart home.
The devices in our homes, cars and offices play a significant role in our daily routines. As IoT technology gains popularity, voice is becoming a natural way to interface with our network of physical objects. Using voice as your universal remote control not only saves you time and effort, but makes home life more enjoyable. Its implementation, however, can be tricky at best and frustrating at worst. What’s more important, after all, than a superb user experience in the comfort of your own home?
What’s a smart home?
In some ways, any living space with an internet connection is already a smart home. Our mobile devices, laptops, and TVs are likely connected to WiFi and give us the ability to control specific parts of the environment, such as streaming a movie from our laptop onto the TV screen. However, a true smart home setup contains devices that are interconnected, which a user can control directly or indirectly.
Talking to a smart speaker, for example, is a way to directly control a smart ecosystem. An example of indirect control would be a case where the smart speaker’s camera detects motion and instantly turns on the lights when someone walks by. IoT (Internet of Things) technology is the foundation of both these cases.
IoT is a network of physical objects that connects with each other over the internet. This seamless connectivity paired with the applicability of conversational AI, cloud computing, and machine learning can create practical and delightful user experiences. It’s no wonder that there may be nearly 22 billion of these IoT devices by 2025.
If you’re thinking of creating the voice-controlled home of your dreams, you are not alone. In fact, people are adopting smart home devices quicker than smart speakers. A study from Voicebot.ai found that nearly half of US adults, that’s over 120 million consumers, own a smart home device. These devices are typically smart TVs or thermostats, followed by smart security and appliances. Owners of smart speakers and smart home devices interact with the devices at nearly the same frequency, demonstrating how the devices complement one another.
Speak Up
There is no shortage of creativity when it comes to making a smart home, especially one that primarily runs on voice. Playing on our most natural interface are home automation products by Josh.ai whose suite of AI devices gives users the option to make “scenes,” or custom commands, that affect several devices in one go. Much like the aforementioned “go to sleep!” example, scenes provide a robust user experience for anyone looking to elevate a daily routine.
Beyond routines, smart devices are becoming increasingly proactive. Google Nest can identify friends or strangers at the door, Samsung’s Family Hub refrigerator makes suggestions based on diet and Alexa alerts users to unusual sounds.
The beauty of smart home devices is how the technology seems to disappear into the environment. Ambient intelligence, a form of computing where devices learn to adapt to the user’s environment, is at the core of smart home technology. This is a major advance from the early days of home automation. Since the term “smart house” was coined in 1984, motion-sensing lights and automatic garage doors of that era pail in comparison to the 21st century’s voice-activated commands and routine facial recognition.
Designing a Home for Voice
Much like other forms of interaction design, users likely ask themselves several questions when deciding how (and why) to use smart products. It is the task of product, UX and conversation design teams to address these challenges.
The “invisible” aspect of smart devices that are integrated into our living spaces and routines can either benefit or hinder users.
1. What devices do people need?
When buying any product, it helps to know why someone wants it in the first place. Perhaps the goal is to enhance home security or to get new colorful lights for a party that’s being thrown soon. In each of these scenarios it is important to consider where the devices will be located. For home security, a person would likely pick a place where they can easily see or control any changes, such as the bedroom or living room.
As a designer, thinking through ways that a smart home product can be used is intrinsically linked to its placement. Just as a consumer will need to address what works best for them, a designer must create a product that follows typical affordances or mental models, such as the recommendation for a user to name lights by its location.
A practical naming convention can save users headaches down the line when a simple “Turn on the lights” leads to the voice AI saying “Which lights?” and forcing the user to remember what (if anything) they named certain lights.
On the hardware side, devices should also be sensitive enough to respond correctly in noisy environments. If you want smart devices that operate outside of using a smart speaker or voice control, then placement of the “control hub” could be on a mobile device or other physical remote.
2. Are devices compatible?
Similar to the idea of brand loyalty is the question of device compatibility. If someone already has some smart devices, but now wants to add a smart speaker to serve as the control hub, it is likely that these devices are compatible due to the Matter protocol. This industry-unifying standard ensures that hundreds of devices will work seamlessly today and in the future. This partnership of several major companies promises to simplify smart home setup and assuages the worry of consumers buying “outdated” products.
If nearly all devices are compatible with one another, then will people be loyal to any one brand? The key product differentiators could come down to UX and the AI’s NLP (natural language processing) abilities. Even if devices are compatible, designers must simplify the process of connecting all these devices.
Onboarding UX, what happens right after a user turns on a device out of its package, is crucially important here. On the NLP side, if one smart speaker is better at understanding languages other than English, for example, then someone may favor that option over another, despite devices being functionally the same otherwise.
3. What do housemates think?
Oftentimes people have to clear home purchases with everyone living there. Families, roommates and pets will all likely interact with these devices at one point, so consumers and designers must consider how to respond. Voice recognition capabilities tend to solve problems where a smart device is having trouble understanding a person. This level of personalization could become more robust with the increasing intelligence of voice AI and solve problems like false wake-ups (devices that talk after incorrectly hearing their name) or completing the wrong request.
Perhaps a housemate doesn’t like the idea of constantly talking to technology to get it to work. Despite the conversational AI technology fueling voice devices, sometimes it is actually better UX when there is no conversation at all.
The ultimate goal of ambient technology is to create an environment that saves us time and effort.
When turning on the lights turns into a 15 second conversation with a robot when the action itself takes less than a second, then something is wrong. Designers need to be careful to distinguish what actions warrant a quick sound or “got it” from a voice assistant instead of a list of suggestions or questions.
Smart Homes for a Smarter You
As smart devices continue to improve, our homes will advance alongside them. Whether using voice or hands to control these devices, the AI behind them is learning to better infer what users want. Teachable AI, a feature found in Amazon Alexa, gives proactive suggestions to common commands, which can in turn create better habits and save time. For example, rather than a user creating a specific “go to sleep” routine, a smart home could infer what to do based on users commanding to turn off lights or lock the door around the same time each day.
The home, or whatever environment smart devices exist in, can become something that helps us learn about ourselves and become more aware of our nuances. As the famous architect Le Corbusier once said, “A house is a machine for living in.” Let’s hope that machine is one that understands us inside and out.
