QUESTION OF THE MONTH: What smart-home platform do you prefer?

I don't have any home automation and not at all interested.  We briefly owned an Amazon Echo but never really used it and to be honest was more trouble than it was worth.  Tried setting it up to "automate" turning on the TV, setting the soundbar, the satellite received etc but it only ever seemed to work 50% of the time.  Apart from that the occasional beep used to annoy us and we didn't like the "always listening" so we turned it off and shoved it on eBay.  We have a Sonos speaker with built in Alexa but that's permanently turned off as well.

I guess Amazon, Google, Apple are likely to be more long lived than some startups that entered the game as those that fold render devices useless because without internet and their servers they don't work (guess not ALL devices are like this.)  Environmentally, I don't like them either - how many servers are needed to turn on a light bulb:

I expect this is fairly typical and this supports (one would hope) thousands of bulbs.  Of course each of these functions will have one or more servers running to support them hopefully only spun up when actually needed for resilience/performance etc).  Whatever, what a waste just because someone wants to turn a light on from their phone!!  God said "Let there be light"; Light said "Downloading firmware update, please wait". 

I don't have any home automation and not at all interested.  We briefly owned an Amazon Echo but never really used it and to be honest was more trouble than it was worth.  Tried setting it up to "automate" turning on the TV, setting the soundbar, the satellite received etc but it only ever seemed to work 50% of the time.  Apart from that the occasional beep used to annoy us and we didn't like the "always listening" so we turned it off and shoved it on eBay.  We have a Sonos speaker with built in Alexa but that's permanently turned off as well.

I guess Amazon, Google, Apple are likely to be more long lived than some startups that entered the game as those that fold render devices useless because without internet and their servers they don't work (guess not ALL devices are like this.)  Environmentally, I don't like them either - how many servers are needed to turn on a light bulb:

I expect this is fairly typical and this supports (one would hope) thousands of bulbs.  Of course each of these functions will have one or more servers running to support them hopefully only spun up when actually needed for resilience/performance etc).  Whatever, what a waste just because someone wants to turn a light on from their phone!!  God said "Let there be light"; Light said "Downloading firmware update, please wait". 

This diagram does not represent "servers". This represensents cloud services and the infrastructure. In reality this is quite an efficiant way. The compute is only used when a voice command is recived.  

What you have here is one of Google's reference diagrams. This is conceptual to show where as many products as possible might fit in. No one would do it this way. Several of the solutions here are duplicates of each other. You select the the one you want to use that best fits your requirments.

These speakers do not listen all the time. A common misconsecption. 

They are listening for a wake word. This then captures the next few seconds of recorded audio. This is sent to a voice to text service at the cloud provider. The text is then matched against a set of commands in a database. That will then send a command to the device.

This is not really any different from pressing a button in a mobile application.