Smart Home Hub Choices

Smart lights are everywhere and come in all colors and price ranges. You can get the cheapest smart light bulbs for under $10 a piece. For many people, smart lights are often the first touchpoint with the smart home category. For the majority of folks buying a few Philips Hue lights and controlling them via the Hue app is sufficient.

However, if you want to go past smart lights and look at motion sensors, multipurpose sensors, water leak sensors, smart thermostats or security cameras, you’ll quickly find yourself installing 3+ apps on your phone in order to control everything. Even with all the apps installed, you’ll likely have some products which don’t properly integrate.

Credit: https://9to5mac.com/2019/05/24/categories-of-smart-home-tech/

Why should you care about integrations?
If your devices are not integrated, you won’t be able to have your motion sensor turn on a light and also have the security camera start a recoding. Or , have a water leak sensor trigger a notification to your phone and also play a sounds on all your speakers in your home to notify you.

Read More

Choosing the right Voice Assistant

Over the past several months, I got more interested in smart homes and home automation in general. I like the idea of triggering automations, schedules or scenes based on voice commands or with my iPhone.

Most of us use an Amazon Echo or a Google Assistant/Home device to dip our feet into the smart home space. To be honest Amazon and Google make it very easy for one to get started. However, as you start using the products, you’ll find the notable differences. Amazon Echo works fantastic across all devices, whereas Google Home is amazing for Android users. iOS devices had its fair share of limitations when working with the Google eco-system.

Read More