It’s a “burden” on do-it-yourself smart home consumers to have to know and understand the various smart home protocols, said Raya Sevilla, ADT senior vice president-product, at Parks Associates’ Thursday virtual Connections conference, a partner program to CES.
The smart home industry needs to tackle interoperability, so it’s not up to customers to have to understand Zigbee, Z-Wave “and all the other jargon that we use,” Sevilla said. It’s “almost unfair” to bring customers into a “maze for them to figure out and unravel what they need ... what they don’t need.” Worse, she said, “oftentimes, they come home to realize it’s not quite compatible.” ADT is “mindful” of the protocols it puts in homes: “We don’t want to strand our customers,” she said.
The ultimate goal is to create a seamless user experience that’s helpful and convenient, leveraging new protocols such as the fledgling Zigbee-spearheaded Project Connected Home Over IP (Chip). This year, ADT will roll out integrations with Google that take advantage of the various technologies Google provides: voice, video analytics and their cloud platforms, she said. Interoperability is going to be key, said Sevilla, noting ADT customers will have different voice assistants in their homes, for instance. Historically, ADT has worked with the Z-Wave protocol, “but we are going to now broaden our horizons to, say, the Chip protocol, the Zigbee protocol," she said.
Setup and onboarding of smart home systems needs to be “much simpler,” said Sevilla, for DIY customers and even pro installers. Simpler installations would reduce the time a technician needs to be in the home, she said, making customers happier. Anne Ferguson, Alarm.com vice president-marketing, concurred, saying an easier installation experience allows the technician to get to the next appointment faster, “and that makes things easier all around.”
Beyond the initial install, Alarm.com wants customers to be comfortable adding products to systems over time. “Now that we have got a pretty robust video analytics capability, I have an opportunity to think about sensors in a very different way,” she said. Once a contact closure is in the home, it could be the springboard to other product offerings, “without having to add hardware” or incurring the cost of a truck roll.
Simplifying the smart home for DIY customers also means combining experiences so control isn't device by device, said Sumati Stewart, senior vice president-sales and marketing for smart home platform company Yonomi. “You want to have these experiences, not just being able to do one thing,” such as turn on a light bulb, she said. Yonomi’s platform integrates 300 devices from 35 brands.
Context is important, too, said Stewart. To harness the full power of the smart home, “context is key,” she said: Knowing who and where customers are and what they’re going to do next provides context for a personalized experience at home and in the car. Those have to be delivered “proactively,” through device-to-device integrations and “anticipatory computing” via artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Interaction needs to be more natural for consumers in the smart home, said ADT’s Sevilla. “We have names that we did not give these voice assistants,” she said, along with stilted commands. “Please turn on bedroom light No. 1 is not necessarily a natural speech,” she said. On whether more smart home actions need to be “anticipatory,” Sevilla said the industry needs to “land on certain business rules that are either set up by the customer or we set up on behalf of the customer that they can change on their own once it’s been set up.”
Many smart home devices today “know which device is closest to the person at this point,” she said. “My various voice assistants in the house know which voice assistant is closer to me,” and they respond accordingly, she said. “We can leverage certain technologies that already exist to make it beneficial to the customer.”
For consumers to buy into those kinds of integrations, they need to be comfortable that their privacy and security are maintained, said Yonomi's Stewart. ADT’s Sevilla said for data to be useful, it must be individualized, meaning companies must be transparent about how they and their partner companies use it. Companies also have to respect that some consumers will want to keep their data to themselves. “There is a bridge we have to build to make our customers more comfortable with sharing data to various partners, whoever they happen to be.”
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January 15, 2021 at 05:30AM
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Smart Home Systems Need 'Simpler' Setup, Smooth Integration, Parks Event Told - Consumer Electronics Daily
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