One of the most common things I get questions about from clients is voice control. Most often clients are referring to being able to control various device throughout the home with Alexa or Google Home smart speakers. These devices offered from Amazon, Google, and soon to be Apple are inexpensive devices that can, play music, answer basic questions like "what's the weather like today", set timers, play games, and other menial tasks. However these novelty devices are quickly transitioning into more powerful interfaces to control the smart home.
All of the major home automation systems Lewis Audio Video installs are able to integrate with these voice control devices , but it's important to have a good understanding of what the limitations are of the current voice control technology.
The biggest shortcoming of current voice control devices in my opinion is in how you have to structure the verbal commands for them to work. For instance if you wanted to be able to turn up the volume of your surround sound system using Alexa you think it would be as easy as building a command like "Alexa turn the volume up" but herein lies what I consider to be the biggest limitation with the current state of voice control. If you were to say "Alexa turn up the volume" Alexa would respond by by turning up the volume of the internal speaker and not your external surround sound speakers. Any command that can be an internal service of Alexa can not also be used to control an external service, because if the service names are the same as a native service built into Alexa, the smart speaker will always assume that you are talking about controlling the internal version of that service. In addition to being careful with what you name your service you also always need to remember to initiate service commands with the words Turn On or Turn Off for Alexa to understand how to execute the service.
Here is an alternate way to achieve our volume up command. "Alexa turn on speaker level up". Because "speaker level up" is not a valid internal service Alexa will issue the programmed command. The problem with this fix is that often the way we have to structure these verbal commands so they work is not conducive to how we normally would speak. The sometimes awkward sentence structure required to verbally control services can end up creating a bit of a learning curve to remember what the voice commands are to control the desired services.
In my opinion the best way to utilize voice control is to task it with managing scenes rather than focusing on individual device control. The term "scene" refers to a preset that is a common configuration we want our home to be set to. For instance we could create a scene that is called "Turn off house". The " turn off house" scene could be configured to shut off all of the interior lights and TV's in the home, and turn on the porch light. To enable this scene we would say "Alexa turn off House" and Alexa would issue the command to turn off the lights and TV's in the home. We alternatively could make scene that is "Turn on House". We could make the "turn on house scene" turn on predetermined lights throughout the house. This would be useful if you were coming home at night and didn't want to walk into a dark home. You could issue the verbal command"Alexa turn on house" as you enter the home and Alexa would turn on the predetermined lights as programmed.
While we are a few years out from Star Trek style voice commnads with a little thought voice control can be a useful tool to manage many common tasks around the house. Just know that we aren't at the point of being able to speak conversationally to our house and have it always understand what we mean.
If you have specific questions about integrating voice control into your existing, or new Smart home send me an email or give me a call and we can discuss your project in more detail.
-Matt