(Editor’s Note: Second in a series of articles on how to successfully and securely deploy smart home technology. See the introduction to this series.)
The first decision you need to make in your smart home journey is selecting the right ecosystem.
By ecosystem, I mean the voice-activated smart hub that is used to deliver audio content from the internet (such as news, weather, and answers to other queries) as well as the main interface with a variety of other smart home devices, such as lighting, thermostats and TVs.
There are three major contenders:
- Apple’s solution, which will require your own integration of three critical technologies: its Home app, an AppleTV set-top box ($149 or $199, depending on the installed storage), and either an iPhone or iPad using Siri;
- Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, which runs on various smart hub/speaker combinations in a variety of form factors that include the Echo ($179) and the Echo Dot ($50), along with various smartphone apps that run on either iOS or Android devices; and
- Google’s Home ($129), another smart hub/speaker device along with various apps that also run on either iOS or Android. Google’s Home runs Assistant, which was developed for its Now product.
With all three, you will need to install a series of smartphone apps to connect your device to your home network and to set them up, and some apps require you to install and authenticate to an additional web service setup.
With Google and Amazon’s smart hubs, the main interface is through voice commands. With Apple’s equipment, you use Siri the way you normally do to command your phone or tablet, with additional vocabulary words to control your connected devices through the Home phone app and the AppleTV box.
With Apple, you will need to use an iOS v10 device running its Home app and a fourth generation version of AppleTV. If you have an older generation of AppleTV, it won’t support remote access to your webcams.
Apple is mostly concerned with security and lighting, Google with knowledge and entertainment, and Amazon with shopping and temperature controls. If you examine the three links above, you’ll see that Apple has the largest collection of apps and devices across a broad range of products, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have deep support in every specific category.
For example, Google’s Home only works with its own Nest and Honeywell Lyric thermostats, while Apple’s solution works with three (iDevices, Ecobee3 and Honeywell), and Amazon’s solution supports Nest, Lyric, Ecobee3, iDevices and Sensi thermostats.
If you already own a smart device, you want to first check each of these lists to see what is supported in each ecosystem, but realize that new devices are being added all the time that may not be immediately reflected online.
I tried out both the Echo Dot and the Google Home devices in our test home for several weeks. The Amazon and Google devices sit on your kitchen counter or table and listen for special wake words (“hey google” or “alexa”) and then respond to your command, if they can answer your query. With Amazon, you can change the wake word to whatever you wish via its smartphone app. With Google, you can’t.
With either Echo or Google Home, you need to tie your device to a particular Amazon or Google account as part of the setup process. That is a big limitation: if you want several family members to have access to configure your hub device, you will either have to share this account’s credentials or create a new account that everyone can share.
Once your hub is setup, you really don’t need to deal with the account information for normal daily operations: you just speak your command and it will respond if it can. Anyone can issue voice commands to the hub, including guests. With Google Home, its indicator lights start flashing when it hears its wake word. With Amazon Alexa, it plays a short “ding” – which you have to wait for before speaking the remainder of your command.
I experimented with moving both hubs around to different networks: Google Home didn’t like being on a school network that had all sorts of security restrictions to prevent rogue access points: apparently it looked like a rogue device to these systems. Otherwise, they are made to find a wireless network and communicate back to your smartphone via Bluetooth for the initial setup routine.
In my tests, there were many commands that could stump the software readily. However, new capabilities and vocabularies are being added continuously, so your mileage may vary.
Once you get your smart hub going, the next thing you want to do is add other smart devices around your home for it to control. Google calls these `devices’, Amazon calls them `skills’. Amazon seems to be further along in figuring out the workflows for these new skill setups than Google, and will try to set up its skills within its own app if it can.
In both cases, the hub has to first see a new device/skill on your home network before you can initiate any further setup. This can be vexing if something is wrong, and so troubleshooting often involves restarting the hub app or removing the device/skill from the hub app and trying to add it again. This is still early days for the smart home, to be sure. For some new devices or skills, you may be asked to re-authenticate yourself to the hub app.
+ MORE ON NETWORK WORLD What is home automation and how do I get started? +
One of the major uses that I found for either hub was playing music. The Google Home devices can recognize each other and play the same audio (I didn’t test this because I just had a single device). Amazon’s devices can’t do this.
Another major use is to assemble a to-do or shopping list. Both devices have this feature, but Amazon has the edge given that you actually buy things from them. The news media has been filled with stories such as this one, where a child ordered an expensive dollhouse using Alexa commands, and then a story about this calamity on a San Diego TV station kicked off multiple similar orders around town.
And then there is the issue of TV and radio advertisers who are trying to outsmart the hubs by including the wake words in their ads, such as what Burger King did recently by releasing a TV ad that purposely triggered the Google Assistant. The ad ends with a person saying “OK Google, what is in the Whopper burger?” Google apparently wasn’t happy with a third-party hijacking its voice command system to advertise fast food and issued a server-side update to specifically disable Burger King’s recording, although curious people can get the information if they speak the command themselves.
Security tip: To avoid these sorts of situations, understand the defaults for your smart hub, such as the one that Alexa has to enable purchases by default.
With some devices, such as the Nest thermostat, you can initiate its setup directly on the device itself: Nest has a small display screen and a rotating collar that you use to input information. But with most other devices, such as lighting or networks, you have to use their accompanying smartphone app to do the remainder of the configuration.
Overall, I didn’t think the Amazon or Google hubs had any inherent advantages or disadvantages: both seemed to be two different ways to do the same job. If you are more invested in one vendor’s ecosystem than the other that might sway your decision.
Next time: looking at the Netgear Velop access points.
