Nowadays, smart home devices are becoming more and more popular among households. In the future, around 30 million U.S. households will add smart home technology to their house (Mordorintelligence, 2019). Furthermore, the growth rates of smart home markets in North America and Europe are prospected to be high. Tech giants like Google and Amazon have brought different types of smart home devices on the market, that are most often voice-controlled devices. Examples are Google Home and Amazon Echo (Alexa). These devices are driven by IoT (Internet of Things), in which the smart home device is interconnected with all kinds of other devices in your home. These days, smart home devices are connected to your TV, music system, thermostat, doorbells, and in the near future with your fridge, oven, and kettle (Luimstra, 2019). These will be all controllable with simple questions and commands given by the customer.
Obviously, the implementation of a smart home device could give the customer various advantages. At first, the customer will be given more convenience in and outside the house. Several devices in your household will be more easily being controlled, often with small voice commands. Whether you want to know the best route to your destination when leaving your house, or you want to arrive in a house that’s heated up, or you want to know what movie to watch after the serie you’re almost done with: it’s all possible with a smart home device (Marr, 2019). Secondly, since many voice-assisted home devices are connected with your energy regulator, smart home devices are an ideal way to save on your future energy expenses. According to your preferences, preprogrammed temperatures and lighting schedules can be implemented, which are also easy to modify after. Lastly, smart home devices tend to increase the safety of your house. Smart doorbells are able to livestream the person that’s at your door, which gives a customer more information about people with possible bad intentions (Luimstra, 2019).
However, the safety of smart home devices (and mainly the voice-controlled ones) has been criticised lately. All information that smart home devices need are saved in the cloud (Marr, 2019). While this is convenient, it also creates an easy point for abuse of your personal information. Voice-assistant devices are known to be easily activated by a so-called ‘wake word’, like the word ‘Alexa’ for Amazon’s voice assistant (Karch, 2019). If activated, all information is recorded and saved in the cloud, and is therefore also accessible for hackers or other wrongdoers. Furthermore, the smart home devices have voices that are increasingly sounding like a normal human voice (Weinberger, 2019). Since we emotionally attach value to voices, this could become a problem when a voice-controlled smart home device will talk to outsiders or family people. So, while the positive aspects of smart home devices are obviously present, its negative threats related to security and trust into these systems may not be neglected. Will voice-controlled smart home devices become almost 100% safe? Are we able to distinguish between voices of smart home devices and the voice of one of our relatives? These question are ripe for future discussion.
References:
Karch, M. (2019). Is Your Smart Device Spying on You? How Can You Stop It?. [online] Lifewire. Available at: https://www.lifewire.com/is-your-smart-device-spying-on-you-4141166 [Accessed 15 Oct. 2019].
Luimstra, J. (2019). De slimme IoT-huiskamer: groot goed, of potentiële spionage?. [online] Sprout. Available at: https://www.sprout.nl/artikel/technologie/de-slimme-iot-huiskamer-groot-goed-potentiele-spionage [Accessed 15 Oct. 2019].
Marr, B. (2019). The 7 Most Dangerous Technology Trends In 2020 Everyone Should Know About. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/09/23/the-7-most-dangerous-technology-trends-in-2020-everyone-should-know-about/#16a928687780 [Accessed 15 Oct. 2019].
Mordorintelligence. (2019). Smart Homes Market | Growth, Trends, and Forecast (2019 – 2024). [online] Available at: https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/global-smart-homes-market-industry [Accessed 15 Oct. 2019].
Weinberger, D. (2019). Can We Trust Machines that Sound Too Much Like Us?. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2019/05/can-we-trust-machines-that-sound-too-much-like-us [Accessed 15 Oct. 2019].
Hey Yves, what you wrote is a really interesting topic!
There’s no denying that smart home devices/ system will greatly faciliate people’s daily life. Who would want to bother with flicking with buttons when you can just voice control everything. I do agree with your idea that the implementation of smart home devices might lead to information insecurity as the system always has the possiblity of being hacked. And even if customers’ information is saved in the database safely, it is still be used by all the platform without users knowing anything about it.
About the confusion between voice of smart device and voice of our family, I am not that sure. I mean, the smart home system probabaly would have an unique voice (just as Siri or Cortana) as it would be way too costy to have a personalized voice for every end user. So what’s the problem of being familiar with another voice? People would recognize it as their smart home system anyway.
But still it is an really good and interesting article to read!
Greta
Hi Yves,
Thank you for your interesting post!
Recently, I have also looked into the future possibilities of smart devices and voice assistant. I also see a lot of potential in the development of this combination for households on a personal level. However, there are shortcomings in the current infrastructure of all these IoT networks. Firstly, there are locale networks and do not communicate with networks from other users (Fetch.Ai, 2019). The potential of a globally connected network are tremendous. This in combination with AI’s self learning features, could boost the usability of virtual assistants. Secondly, as you mentioned, there are some a high degree of safety hazard of the due to the fact that all the personal data is saved at centralized points. People could intentionally target these vulnerable systems to harm the users. I believe that cloud systems could use blockchain to improve the security and scalability of the IoT connected systems. There are even companies, such as Fetch.Ai, who try to combine these technologies with an economical model. Through their system, virtual agents could autonomously trade information and negotiate deals with each other.
I find it very exciting to see the potential of all these future technologies. But, will they ever create real value for the mainstream market? I believe it will. What do you think?
Cheers,
Mitchell
Source:
Fetch.Ai. (2019). Intelligent Autonomous Agents Optimize Vehicle Journeys LIVE | Use Case | Blockchain AI | Fetch.AI. Retrieved 7 October 2019, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvUFchxbBOQ
Nice article! The digitization of products does take a lot of risks with us. A lot of products that seem safe for us, can be hacked very easily. For most of the products, this does not cause a problem yet. However, in the future most devices will be digital, like the lock of your house and the controls of your future car. If these systems can be hacked, it can cause serious damage.
At this moment, Google Chromecast (widely used) is trying to fix a bug that they have had for years. From a large distance, it is possible to start the Chromecast and play things on your television that imitate your voice and that for example says; “Alexa, turn of the lights” (Glenny, 2019). The small bugs we find now, can exist in all smart home devices, and if they are not fixed before the smart home devices are widely used, these can cause great trouble.
I feel like these devices will never the 100% safe as your data is stored in a cloud. However, the EU is well on its way of making regulations to make these products safer and more private.
Like the topic, I think its an interesting read! A few weeks ago I was in Silicon Valley for a competition/conference. Besides the high tech and the convenience of instant Uber’s, electric scooter sharing platforms, and ApplePay, I stayed in an Airbnb for 4 days/nights. An entire home. Not just that. It was a smart home, smart lights, smart TV, smart temperature sensors, smart-locks, it had it all, and of course a virtual assistant (Google Home). To be very honest, I didn’t stand still by the safety/security that is often questioned with these devices, and I was just blown away by the fact that I could be running through the house early in the morning getting ready whilst asking Google to switch the music, tell me the max temperature that day, order me an Uber in 5 minutes, and turn off all the lights and lock the doors. Sure, it’ll store that in the cloud, but look how much time it saves. I think more and more users will shift to the idea that it is more convenient and efficient that having to do it manually over how safe/secure it is.