Reading through the comment section on “I’m never investing in Google’s smart home ecosystem again” (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35849060) made me realize: Is there no company smaller than Google or Amazon or Apple willing or able to make a better smart home device? Especially now with AI solving the language-proficiency problem in talking to these devices, it seems like the rest of the product is just API integrations with a few hundred smart home hardware vendors, and some easy lookups like weather and calendar. Is there something I’m missing about why the current generation of these still suck so bad? As a weekend project I bolted speech-synthesis and speech-recognition to ChatGPT (and have seen similar “Show HN” posts) and immediately had a more interesting conversational partner than Alexa or, god help them, Siri has ever been. Why are three of the most profitable technology companies in the history of mankind unable to come up with better than Google Home, Alexa, and Siri? Is there some unusual challenge here that I fail to understand? Plenty of people I know would spend $500-1000 (not to mention the lightbulbs, appliances, or various “smart” gadgets) on just the smart home “brain” itself, and not even for something HN folks might consider “ideal” (privacy respecting, no ads etc), but just for a device that actually, usefully, and consistently does most of the things these devices purport to do. Why can’t three different trillion-dollar companies even manage that, and more to the point, why aren’t there more billion-dollar companies even trying?
Story Published at: May 8, 2023 at 03:59AM
Story Published at: May 8, 2023 at 03:59AM