I’ve become annoyed with “smart home” because the reliability is so bad. About 20% of the time the light doesn’t turn on or off.
I’ve used Alexa with Feit and Phillips Hue for about 4 years and Apple HomePod for about a year.
At least once a day, I get an error message like “Oops, I had a problem with that.” Apple seems worse about this. It sometimes works by calling the other with the same command. It always works when using the app on my phone.
I expect 100% reliability. The same as my light switch. The light switch works every time.
I also don’t like how chatty they are. I can’t turn off the voice confirmations with Apple. I don’t want it to tell me that it turned on the lights.
I laugh imagining a Star Trek episode where the computer responds as shittily as our current state of smart homes.
I had reliability issues with Philips due to memory limits of their hub. It becomes slow and less reliable above about 50 devices. That sounds like a lot, but every light switch and motion sensor is also a device. So in a medium sized house you exceed that limit.
The hardware however is very good. Replacing the hub with zigbee2mqtt and a good USB Zigbee transmitter solves the issues.
I’ve used Alexa with Feit and Phillips Hue for about 4 years and Apple HomePod for about a year.
At least once a day, I get an error message like “Oops, I had a problem with that.” Apple seems worse about this. It sometimes works by calling the other with the same command. It always works when using the app on my phone.
I expect 100% reliability. The same as my light switch. The light switch works every time.
I also don’t like how chatty they are. I can’t turn off the voice confirmations with Apple. I don’t want it to tell me that it turned on the lights.
I laugh imagining a Star Trek episode where the computer responds as shittily as our current state of smart homes.