Seamless smart homes are all about communication and it takes a variety of forms. While devices talk to each there via bluetooth, voice activators or wireless, residents have ultimate control through apps, pre-programmed commands and smartphone access.
Increasingly, however, control of the smart home is as simple as voice command, with a whole array of voice activators like Google Home, Amazon Echo and Apple HomeKit on the market and available to assist.
Here’s a lowdown on voice activation and how the technology works.
A little bit about speech recognition
Computers have been able to recognise speech since the 1950s but it wasn’t until about 2010 that the conversation gained fluency and intuition. This was when big names like Google and Apple made huge strides, with voice recognition apps like Siri and Google Voice Search.
Heralding a new era of personalised communication with computers, this software surpassed the 80% accuracy level of previous years, allowing users to accurately seek and find information.
But still the technology was confined to discussions with your laptop until about 2015, when voice activators for the smart home hit the mainstream with the arrival of major players like Apple HomeKit, Amazon Echo and Google Home.
The voice activator
In a nutshell, voice activators are tiny wireless devices that can be positioned around the smart home to perform a series of tasks via voice command. At the moment the field is dominated by the big brands of Apple with HomeKit, Amazon and Echo, and Google with Home, but there are further players in this space outside the major names.
It’s important to note HomeKit, Echo and Home are the hardware which then accesses virtual assistance/artificial intelligence software. These virtual assistants perform the task of speech recognition and then activate a user’s commands, and there are some familiar names within this group.
More info: lerasmarthomes.com.au
