How to create your own smart home: the basics
An introduction to the internet of things, and how you can use it to make your life easier.
[Blog Source: https://www.choice.com.au/electronics-and-technology/gadgets/tech-gadgets/buying-guides/iot-smart-home ]
What is a smart home?
The smartification of your home may be inevitable.
In 2015, the average Australian household had nine connected devices. It was 17 in 2018, and by 2022 it's expected to reach 37. That's a four-fold increase in seven years.
Many of these new gadgets will be part of the internet of things – household appliances made 'smart' through internet connectivity or by connecting to other smart devices via your Wi-Fi router. A smart home can have many or just a few of these gadgets. With each one you add, your home gets more connected.
In days gone by, IoT devices were largely limited to simple commands such as turning on and off, setting temperatures, alarms and so on. These functions were also only available in a handful of proprietary products. You had to access each of your gadgets via different apps, and many of them didn't work with both Android and iOS (iPhones and iPads).
Today, almost any appliance you can think of from big name brands such as LG, Samsung and Sony, has some form of 'smart', technology built in. This, combined with the advent of smartphones, tablets and smart assistants that are used to control smart products, has made IoT devices more accessible to the average person. Making a smart home is largely plug and play.
There are three main ways you can use most smart home gadgets:
Apps
There are still plenty of different apps, but most products have them for both iOS and Android, and manufacturing brands tend to use just one app to control all or many of their devices. However, these manufacturer apps still often don't play nice with other brands.
Exceptions such as the Google Home app can let you control multiple devices from one place, though often with a reduced suite of features.
Smart assistants
Smart assistants such as Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa can be the central hub of a smart home. They're not mandatory, but they make life easier by controlling all your devices from one spot using voice commands.
Android phones come with Google Assistant on board, and iPhones have Siri. No phones have Alexa built in, but you can buy a smart speaker with any of these three assistants built in.
All you have to do is give the voice command to activate your assistant, then tell it to do something. For example, "Hey Google, dim the lights in the lounge room" or "Alexa, play something romantic from Spotify".
Once you get more comfortable with your gadgets, apps like If This Then That (IFTTT) let you create your own voice commands. You might program a smart assistant so that the command, "It's movie time" dims the lights, turns on your TV and makes sure there's no music playing anywhere in the house.
Automation
Some apps and devices can talk to each other without you acting as the go-between.
Set the coffee machine to start brewing and lights to turn on as soon as your morning alarm goes off, or have the air conditioning power up when your smartwatch gets within 500 metres of home.
Different brands often still aren't great at working with each other directly, but IFTTT can make apps and gadgets play nice even if they weren't designed to.