This is very cool. However I don’t really want to bounce all my home automation commands to the cloud. I hope there will be an open weights approach one day. I’ve spent a lot of time setting up my local only home automation system, it would suck if it didn’t work during an internet outage, and also there are obvious privacy problems.
Rereading some things and because there's no official benchmarks, I misspoke about the ballpark comparison., but the open model's still a useful foundation to work with
Side note - just like most people don't need an intelligent personal assistant to manage and respond their emails and book their flights, most people also don't need smart homes. Century old toggle switches are more than enough in a 3 room apartment or 5 room house unless you have a mention.
My primary beef with smart home (having tried it) is that every person that visits your home ends up confused about some element of it. A light switch that goes up and down is universally understood.
Also a quick NFC sticker in each room taking you to a small HTML site containing settings (temp, ventilation, lights, shutters, setting a alarm by the lights) has been golden.
No one wants to: download Shelly app + AC app + look for ventilation IR controller + figure out how casting works for the TV + figure out how to use the Shelly app to turn lights into an alarm. It's too much friction for little gain. But a quick tap? Great.
But tapping your phone on a NFC sticker bringing all those controls together per room in stead of per category (all lights in Shelly app. Person in room #1 has no interests in the lights in room #4 at the same time.).
IF you tap it while not on Wifi yet it just tells you to connect to Wifi. :-)
One "all house" sticker next to the front door allows any last person leaving or first person entering to put the entire house in active / idle mode.
Works wonders. And as soon as local AI is quick enough the stickers will be a microphone!
That's clever and all - solid setup, good work. But I still think you either overestimate the average house guest or have particularly savvy/young house guests.
My primary beef with my home built in 1963 is that half of the switches aren’t wired to what you would expect and I have no attic or basement with access to make it easy to rewire. Home assistant and smart switches are a godsend because I can repurpose the existing switch boxes to actually do what I want them to do with the added bonus of being able to control them remotely from my phone.
We have 8 light buttons in our living room/dining room/kitchen space. It is very convenient to us that we have 1 button for turning all of them on/off at the door to upstairs (at night turn off all lights and go to bed upstairs, in the morning come downstairs and turn on all lights) - but also have 1 on/off button near our back door for when we leave/come home.
Next to that: on/off toggles a schedule where the lights are bright and cold-ish by day, and low and warm by night without us having to manually adjust each light every hour or something.
Again, need is a big word. But it's very convenient and pleasant.
Guess I'm a bit less impressed seeing that for some of the more intelligent driven+action work -- splitting requests in the video -- they had to kick out to an anthropic model.
That's fair, but it highlights how this would actually be used. It doesn't really seem like a competitor to other models but instead a way to make these real systems more enjoyable to deal with.
Haiku, to rewrite a sentence as two discreet commands.
I agree that it was notable that they delegated to an existing LLM, but I don't think it detracts much from the value proposition (not yet proven) of their demo.
Agreed but is it much easier to deal with if you need to have all of these sub processes integrated? How does one know when you need to reword a request? What if Anthropic then has a type error, then debugging that just got harder.
