Hiya, Good morning on this Sunny and yet cold morning here in Ireland, a bit quiet around the area due to lockdowns but otherwise grand, so again this week, I have a whole bunch of smart home-related stories for you, so let’s check them out! Rotating Smart Displays 📺 So Amazon, have released another Alexa-enabled […]
Thread Smart Home Devices Overview
Smart devices must be able to exchange information with one another in a connected world continually. To achieve this, they need to communicate through a common language, i.e., communication protocols. Protocols entail how signals are sent between devices to trigger specific actions like turning on the lights. Protocols are ‘spoken’ through wired or wireless layers, […]
Smart Doorbell Responses, Google 2030, New Smart Bulbs….
Hiya, I hope everyone had a great weekend so far and that your Sunday is off to a strong start. There’s a lot to discuss in today’s issue, so let’s jump right in. Ring Gets Smarter Yet another product feature announcement from Ring Ring this week, namely the addition of some cool artificial intelligence to […]
Smart Home Laboratories, Walls & More 🧱
Good valentine’s morning, lots of wind and rain outside today here in Ireland, let’s hope it improves later! 🧪 Smart Home Laboratory Looks like the Smart Home Hub grandpappy has added some lab functionality to its app. The new SmartThings feature is aimed at those of you who have already the Smartthings ecosystem and looking […]
Video Doors, UWB, and Smart Home Glitches
Good morning everybody; things are pretty good over here in Ireland, the vaccine rollout is starting to progress, which should hopefully improve things for everyone. On the smart home front, it has been a relatively busy week in terms of new stuff and things breaking! Time for some coffee! so enjoy this weeks update: Video […]
Outside HomeKit & Smart Home Dogs
Good morning everybody; hope all is well. ……All great here, our second-youngest is 12 today, so big day planned! Also, just finished charging the Ring gen 2 doorbell, so need to re-attach to the bracket later this morning. Otherwise, that’s it, enjoy some smart home stories I picked up this week on the Interweb! HomeKit […]
🏠Google Home Guests and TP-LInk Smart Homes
Good morning everybody; hope all is well. Grabbed three smart home stories this week that I thought might be of interest, enjoy and touch base again next Sunday. Google Guests 🧑🤝🧑 Privacy is big nowadays, particularly when it comes to smart speakers in our homes. If you own a Google Home smart speaker and not […]
Smart Homes Coaching Call Services Announced
Smart Homes School announces the availability of coaching calls that provide people with a unique opportunity to avail of Gerard’s new 1-on-1 coaching services. Sometimes, you just need a professional to offer perspective at a fork in the road or when the cloud of confusion is too thick to see beyond. Ready to start your […]
Smart Home Video Courses Museum Series
The smart home is with us for well over 20 years; and during that period monumental, industry-changing innovation has occurred within the smart home industry. Back in 1999, I wrote a book on the subject of home networking and worked with some really talented people to create a range of multimedia training courses on the […]
What’s the Story With Smart Doorbells?
On investigating the cool features of smart doorbells, we’ll discover just how self-aware visitor announcement devices are becoming. This is a nascent market, but one that’s destined to catch up with more mature home security gadgets, such as smart locks and the ever-watchful entrance IP camera. Accepting Past Doorbell Limitations This is the age of […]
What is a Smart Thermostat in 2020?
Here is the shortest post I’ve written in a while! The last number of years have seen rapid developments in the smart thermostat space. A smart thermostat, typically wall-mounted, connects to your Wi-Fi network and measures ambient temperature in the room using onboard or satellite sensors. Once you define a comfortable level the thermostat will […]
Essential Guide to Smart Home Virtual Assistants & Smart Speakers
Hiya, Gerard here, just spent this Saturday evening posting the Internet’s most detailed set of articles about smart speakers and associated virtual assistants, that’s a pretty big achievement on this windy evening here in Ireland 🙂 This guide (ten blog posts in total) is intended to be read by the following people: Homeowners interested in […]
Echo Show, HomePod Smart Home Speakers & More
The Echo Show: A Window into Alexa’s Soul? Is there any gadget that doesn’t look just that bit cooler when a screen is added to it? The Samsung Family Hub Refrigerator incorporates a 21″ screen in one of its doors. Likewise, smart thermostats and now smart virtual assistants are taking that same approach. To that […]
Smart Speaker Drawbacks and Here Comes The Future
The piecemeal adoption of different smart standards comes back to bite manufacturer (And us!) on the behind. You should be able to buy a branded smart accessory and know it’ll be recognized instantly so that the hardware plays nice with every other part of the system. That generally is the case, but there may be […]
Smart Speaker Home Assistants & Your Privacy
It’s time to play devil’s advocate for a little while. You’ve seen the reviews for all of the available virtual assistants. Maybe your favorite smart persona doesn’t have a product housing just yet, but you know it’s coming. Besides, there are smartphone apps that give you a taste of the future, but it is just […]
Amazon Alexa Vs Google Home – What Type of Smart Speaker Should You Purchase?
It’s a big question. Fortunately, it’s hard to go wrong, particularly if you’ve read the earlier pages of his electronic document. Two mainstream options are out there right now. Amazon Echo has been around the longest. It was released into the consumer wilds in the middle of 2015, although this release was limited to the […]
Smart Speakers And Controlling Your Smart Home
Your smart speaker is equipped with a powerful Artificial intelligence. It’s built with a solid and expandable foundation. Bluetooth and Wi-Fi circuits are churning all day long while contacting natural language servers in the cloud. Simultaneously, the same communication modules are streaming music, fetching weather forecasts, reading football scores, and pulling up the next episode […]
Exploring Smart Speaker Components
Your car is opening the garage door by calling up your voice assistant. An audiobook is using Amazon’s Whispersync or Google tech to pick up reading your New York Times bestseller in your car. It’s picked up the narrative at the same place you stopped at in bed the night before. The technology behind your […]
Different Smart Home Assistant Form Factors
The Virtual Assistants you’re hearing about on the news and in tech articles are a direct result of artificial intelligence. The earliest examples of these pseudo personalities didn’t even have a cozy electronic processor to inhabit. These were the chatbots that represented the first generations of consumer-friendly smart interfaces. Regarded as simple computer programs, a […]
What is a Smart Home Assistant?
Pull away from the circuits and codes. Knowledge of that abstract coding is handy, especially if you enjoy following developments in artificial intelligence, but too much conceptual thinking can cause headaches. So pull your focus away from all of this talk about software architecture. Instead, let’s strip things back by assuming a clutter-free stance. At […]
Naming Popular Smart Home Speaker Artificial Intelligence Systems
Four big names dominate the AI consumer smart speaker market. This isn’t a scenario where IBM and its Watson Cognitive Technology engine has a place, nor is it one where Google’s DeepMind can make inroads. No, in the grand scheme of things your device will mimic the capabilities of these globally adept machine services, but […]
About AI-Powered Smart Home Speaker Voice Recognition Systems
First of all, what is artificial intelligence? You know what it’s not. It’s not the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, nor is it the calming tones of Jarvis, Iron Man’s own inbuilt virtual assistant. Movies tend to have an interesting take on how you’ll eventually interact with an Artificial Intelligence, but such […]
Smooth Wi-Fi is Essential in Smart homes
Nowadays, a modem router device is supplied by your broadband supplier, this piece of hardware not only interconnects your household with the Internet, but it also radiates a Wi-Fi signal. Not always but in some instances, your router can affect the performance levels of your smart home. On occasions, this piece of hardware may not […]
Smart Home Cuckoos 🦉 Ring Doorbell Birds and More
Hiya, Happy Sunday everyone, welcome to our weekly digest of smart home stories, grab a coffee or tea and enjoy! Virtual Smart Home Perimeters Geofencing is a major pillar of any smart home and guess who has added this functionality? Ring! Yes, they are pretty much in the news every week and this is a […]
🐌 🔌Smart Snails, GE, HomeKit, and Air Gestures
Happy Sunday everybody, hope all is well wherever you are in the world this nice morning. All quiet here at the O’Driscoll smart home. As always I’ve gathered some snippets of what’s going on in the smart home space this past week, so enjoy! New Google Nest Hub on the Way According to Internet sources, […]
🐅Tigers, AI, and Bye Google Home Max
Another wild week around the world! And Covid seems to continue its onward march in people’s lives everywhere. For a little bit of light reading, check out some smart home stories I ran across during the past seven days: Apple Siri Tiger Sounds 🐅 Yes, you read correctly, Apple has added a new fun trick […]