In a world that is more connected than ever before, millions of us have welcomed leading
technology giants into our properties for entertainment, to adjust the heating and even
answer the door.
Now a major market in its own right, the likes of Amazon, Google, Samsung, Apple and others
are all competing for smart home dominance.
But why do these businesses care so much about where we live? Why are they developing such
useful systems? What does this new world mean for our built environment? And what drove
so many of us to invite these multinational corporations into the highly personal spaces
we call home?
In the past decade, our societies have become increasingly reliant on the connectivity that
is enabled by digital technologies.
With almost every adult in the developed world now owning a smartphone, the ability for
people to contact one another and remain engaged with news, entertainment, current affairs
and social media has had a profound impact on our culture.
Beyond our mobile devices, a wide array of products and systems now share information
and data online in the internet of things.
Data is now used across countless different aspects of our towns and cities to inform
systems and streamline activities – and, in recent years, we have welcomed technology
into our homes in a much more permanent way than ever before.
While once limited to our computers, the central heating or a handful of appliances – we
are now sharing our addresses with AI assistants, advanced security installations and even robots.
Produced by some of the world’s largest technology giants, these systems offer us
a range of benefits, though often in exchange for our data and intelligence around our habits
and preferences.
So, what is driving us to welcome in some of the biggest names in tech and what do those
organisations stand to gain from entering a market that their original business plans
would have ignored?
The establishment of a platform from which consumers find it difficult or inconvenient
to leave is a powerful strategy that underpins almost every successful technology giant.
Apple’s iCloud system for example, makes it easy to transfer all of your data and contacts
between your phones when you upgrade, provided you stick to iPhones. It makes it easier to
invest in an iPad rather than another tablet. The Apple Watch is designed to operate best
with an iPhone. Apple Music works best with Apple devices.
While recent decades have seen intense battles for dominance of the internet search, smartphone,
music streaming and online retail markets – our homes have remained largely untapped,
yet highly fertile ground.
That all changed in 2014 with the release of Amazon’s Alexa artificial intelligence
(AI) assistant and Echo smart speaker.
Despite numerous home technologies existing beforehand, Amazon’s entry to the market
took things up a gear.
With a voice recognition system that surpassed most others on the market and a format that
was designed to be incredibly useful, Amazon gave us the ability to play music, hear the
news, keep lists, and learn recipes – quickly earning the approval and trust of millions.
Now – and in a clear effort to become the platform in our homes – Amazon’s Alexa
system can be linked to a number of third-party operating systems, allowing us to control
our lights, adjust the heating, open the curtains or check who is at the door.
As the importance of mobile devices begins to fall and the power of the internet of things
and connectivity increases, technology giants are attaching critical importance to becoming
the established smart platform in our properties.
Amazon’s early and rapid progress ignited an intense battle between several leading
technology giants for control of our homes – a market that is set to be worth USD $54BN by 2022.
Employing a similar tactic of becoming highly useful to each of us in music and entertainment
first, before branching out to support a broader range of home systems, Google launched Google
Home in 2016, Apple introduced their own HomePod in 2018 and Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Home
later that same year.
Each of these systems can integrate with countless other third-party home systems, allowing them
to become a platform.
However, despite the apparent similarities in approach, the motives behind each of these
tech giants entering the smart home market differ significantly.
Amazon is one of the most successful e-commerce businesses that the world has ever known and
entered the home market primarily to make shopping on Amazon easier to do while driving
up its Prime membership numbers.
Steadily, the tech giant has expanded its product range around its core offering. Amazon
Key, for example, is a smart security camera and lock system that allows Prime members
to receive deliveries into their homes. It has also acquired leading video doorbell manufacturer
Ring and improved the interoperability of its products with its own platform.
Conversely, Amazon lacks the mobile dominance that Apple and Google enjoy and is now developing
its Alexa system to integrate with cars in an effort to increase our reliance on its platform.
By 2025, 1 in 5 vehicles are expected to offer internet connectivity, extending the influence
of AI assistants and catalysing the technology race in telematics and autonomous vehicles.
Google’s entry to the home market was again driven by its core business model and arguably
the threat that Amazon posed to it.
With a proportion of online searches shifting to voice recognition in Amazon’s Alexa system,
Google launched its own product and the extensive “make Google do it” marketing campaign
to defend its core search business.
Now, Google is refocusing attention on its range of Nest products, further growing its
share of the home platform market.
Samsung’s existing foothold in our properties across a range of appliances – from televisions
to ovens – gave it head start in the smart home market that was simply too good to surrender.
Its product range has now grown substantially and even features a fridge capable of generating
shopping lists based on your eating habits.
For Apple, the falling influence of mobile devices combined with the rise of connectivity
and progress by Amazon and Google were key drivers.
However, with its core business centred
around hardware, Apple’s primary motive with its HomePod is to retain people on its
platform and to become the primary interface in our new smart home world.
The battle between these private organisations for influence in our homes in incredibly intense,
with Apple and Amazon now even partnering with house builders to integrate their systems
at design and construction stage, locking owners into their systems.
The result of such tension between the technology giants is a rapidly changing landscape in
our properties. With the smart home technologies market maturing, once quirky ideas are now
experiencing mainstream uptake – from robotic vacuum cleaners and plug adapters that can
link any device to the internet to voice controlled lightbulbs, sleep monitoring systems and even
AI assistant-controlled coffee machines.
Just like any human relationship, the development of trust has been a key factor in millions
of us allowing these technology giants access to our homes. We know them, are familiar with
them, feel reassured by their unfaltering reliability and usefulness and are comforted
to know that most of our friends and families trust them too.
Perhaps underlining the importance of this point, Facebook are rumoured to have postponed
the development of their own smart speaker system as they work to rebuild trust in their brand.
The rise of smart technologies in our homes is occurring in parallel to the development
of numerous smart cities around the world; societies that use data and connected systems
to continually improve how they operate.
These markets are not immune from the influence of technology giants either. Samsung are pioneering
a number of smart city systems across Asia, while Google’s sister company Sidewalk Labs
is planning to construct a controversial internet-based smart city in a waterfront district of Toronto.
The value proposition of such smart societies is their ability to leverage trends in data
to improve the way that we use our built environment and live our lives.
To date, such data has largely been derived from public or commercial buildings.
The growth of advanced connectivity in our homes offers the chance to learn more about
and ultimately improve the way we live, through anonymised, trend-level data sets.
While smart home systems can enable all of us to operate our properties more sustainably,
their ability to learn and anticipate user patterns could mean that millions of smart
homes running on the same operating systems could permit electricity providers to dim
the lights across a neighbourhood by a fraction at peak times.
The same principle could be used with heating and cooling systems, saving consumers money
and reducing the need for additional power plants to be brought online.
Indeed, many aspects of smart home technology could potentially deliver society-wide benefits
when scaled across a town or city district.
Security systems could reduce crime rates and improve safety, while monitoring systems
that improve supervision of babies or vulnerable people could in turn reduce the pressure on
health services.
Such influence over our lives of course demands a high level of responsibility from these
large, privately-owned technology businesses.
While regulation still strives to keep pace with technological advancements, we have seen
challenges emerge around power or internet outages rendering critical systems unable
to function, rumours of real people at tech firms listening in on private conversations
via AI assistants and even personal data being leveraged to inform elections.
In our quest to improve so many aspects of our lives with connectivity, it is important
that boundaries, legislation and the difference between right and wrong is robustly debated.
With the battle between the major technology giants maturing the smart home market at a
rapid rate, and the roll out of 5G data networks, the homes we inhabit in the not too distant
future are likely to become even more advanced.
Household chores could become completely automated, all devices could be automatically charged
wirelessly, we could receive recipe suggestions based on the food we have left in our fridges
at the end of the week, the indoor temperature could be personalised around each individual
occupant and our AI assistants could inhabit human-looking sociable robots.
Indeed, with advanced AI systems now able to learn and adapt to their surroundings over
time, we could see the emergence of AI personalities that are truly unique to us and our lifestyles
– an extension of our families that would even come with us when we move.
With all of these concepts and more in development, smart homes and the technology giants that
enable them, look set to transform the way we live in the years ahead.
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