The Connected Home – Voice Control the Next Frontier

Until recently, controlling your smart home tech boiled down to apps and automation — scheduling a smartened up lamp to turn on at sunset, for instance, or using your phone to turn it off after you’ve climbed into bed. But what if you could simply tell your smart home to turn it off?

It might sound like the stuff of “Star Trek” or “The Jetsons,” but recent advancements in speech recognition technology have made a voice-controlled smart home completely attainable, and many of the gadgets that promise to get the job done are already available. Some come from ambitious startups while others come from the titans of the industry, but all of them want to give your smart home a set of ears.

We expect voice control to continue to play a central role in the development of the so-called Internet of Things, which seeks to connect everyday devices and appliances with each other and with their users. For now, here’s a rundown of the voice-centric gadgets on the market today, along with a few potential up-and-comers.

Amazon Echo

It started as a smart speaker capable of streaming whatever music you asked it to play, but it quickly became clear that Amazon Echo was capable of a whole lot more. let you hail a ride from Uber, order a pizza from Domino’s or stream music straight from Spotify — provided you’re a paid, premium subscriber of the service.

Apple Home Kit

The elephant in the voice-controlled smart room is Siri, the AI assistant found in Apple devices like the iPhone, iPad and the Apple Watch. Apple granted her smart-home access with HomeKit, a set of control protocols built into the latest versions of its iOS operating system. Purchase and install a HomeKit-compatible smart-home gadget, and you’ll be able to control it directly through your device by telling Siri what you want to do.

Google Home

With Google Home, users will be able to access Google Search anywhere within range of the speaker. They’ll be able to turn on music, ask questions, get responses, and basically have a smart device in their home that’s always listening.

With Google Home, which is their more expanded version of Google Now. Now has always been a great voice assistant, but it doesn’t offer the same “human” interactions that we see with Apple’s Siri.
Google Assistant plans to be the smartest AI assistant ever created. will become more and more a control center for your whole home.