Memo to the Smart Home: We Need to Talk

What if your home could talk to you? What if it knew exactly what you wanted it to do, and made it as easy to activate as just saying “Go” or pushing a button?

This is the promise of the not-so-distant future – and it could all be enabled by the Roomba that’s already scooting across your floor. Yes, your little robot vacuum cleaner could hold the keys to the fully automated smart home we’ve long dreamed of.

How is that possible? Well, aside from its primary function as a floor-cleaning robot, Roomba also acts as a sophisticated mobile intelligence platform, complete with sensors and IoT integration and connectivity. It’s constantly learning the layout of the home, so it knows where it is and can move through the space with ultimate efficiency. Roomba also maps where furniture or other barriers are, so it really knows where the important things (from the perspective of cleaning) are.

Because the robot is capable of spatial awareness, you can just tap a button on your phone and have it clean around the kitchen table, the living room, or the whole house. This is the type of intelligence that helps turn the robot into a partner that truly collaborates with the homeowner.

Now what if we took those same mapping capabilities and paired them with an even simpler user interface? What if we could make it more convenient by activating everything with voice commands?

That probably doesn’t sound too far-fetched, since we already have AI that understands words and sentences (like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and the Google Home Smart Speaker). However, today’s smart speakers face a critical limitation: they don’t know where anything is, so they can’t really do much work in the home.

If your smart speaker doesn’t know what you call things (or where they are), it’s difficult to have a real conversation with your home.

Learning the Common Language

Most of today’s smart devices have such a limited understanding of the space that even a voice command that sounds simple – like “Turn on the lights” – is difficult. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the average us home has over 45 lightbulbs. Which lights are you talking about? In which room? The more our technology can understand the language of the home, the better the conversation we can have with it.

If your home doesn’t know where you’re talking about, it can’t do what you’re asking. The next great advance in the smart home will be taking location-based voice commands and making them real, and that requires learning the language of the home. That’s why the smart home revolution starts with the humble Roomba – because no other devices have the need or the capability to learn the language of the home like your robot vacuum.

Of course, every home is special and unique, so it will be critical to enable automations that include specific names – even odd names that you might have for different rooms. To make the smart home work for its occupants, the technology has to learn this common language. Then we can start having some productive conversations!

You’ll say, “Roomba, clean under the muck room table,” and your home will hear it, understand exactly where you’re talking about, and initiate the job you just asked for. Or maybe the home itself will prompt you through your smart speaker when it detects that the kitchen is empty: “It looks like you’re finished with your meal. Would you like me to clean up?” Then it’s as easy as just saying, “Yes.” And this type of control can potentially be leveraged by all of the smart devices in your home.

That’s when the smart home begins to deliver the seamless experience we’ve long been promised. By creating robots that understand the home and the language we use to refer to it, we’re building an ability to wire it up, and it control it with simple commands we don’t have to memorize – because it is language we use every day.

When you can just tell your home exactly what you want it to do, you’re working in a collaborative partnership with technology. You’re not fighting to control a home that doesn’t understand you; instead, you’re actually talking to a partner that learns what you like and does it all automatically. Now that’s smart!

Would you talk to your home if you thought it could help you? Would you want your home to talk to you?

For more on robotics, innovation and the future of the smart home, follow me on Twitter @colinangle.