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

I refuse to have one of these spies in my house.

If I got ambitious for home automation I would build an entirely local system that shared nothing on the web.

I'd rather have it run locally and not rely on servers located half way around the world.
Hence the reason why I'm experimenting with Willow and integrating it in my already existing openHAB ecosystem.

dougw said:

I don't carry a cell phone with me

I've been carrying that thing far too much lately. I need to just leave it on the counter when I'm in the garden.

I think a lot of it has to do with me needing to be easy to get a hold of by my wife during chemo, just in case. Thankfully that's complete now.

I used to set my clock radio to wake me up with the CBC, but I have totally weaned myself off alarm clocks and I find I still get to work on time. Despite being a "bit" of a gadget freak, I try not to become dependent on technology whenever possible. For example, I don't carry a cell phone with me when I am out and about.

We have the Amazon Echos to help control our smart home, because the dot was on sale  but it has served us well, and we added a couple more since that first one. The one in the rec room is a slightly bigger sphere (still a dot, I think?) to get better music quality, and we got a Show for the display and camera, meant for the cottage but because it ties so closely to our home system we decided to keep it at home. We never use the camera, but the display is a nice addition.
When not directly being used it shows us random pictures from a folder of photos we added, and things like weather... seems weirdly random and I wish I knew how to tune what it shows. It's probably possible. Maybe one day I'll spend the time to figure it out.

We do use them all the time, but mostly for on-demand control like "turn off the bedroom lights", "turn on the christmas tree" or "turn on the corner light". And of course for playing music. It does a great job of playing music through a Sonos speaker we keep in the living room.

Our devices are half Z-Wave and half WiFi. The Z-Wave were given to us by our electrical supplier (BC Hydro) as part of a study years ago, which started us on the road to home automations. Since then I've added a few dozen WiFi plugs and switches.

Most of the WiFi devices are controlled with the SmartLife App, which allows devices from various makers to be controlled in just one app. Some are TP-Link, I think there's an accidental other one I thought was SmartLife but turned out to be specialized.

The BC Hydro app controls the Z-Wave devices.

Most of our automations are directly from the main apps, and are generally to turn on outside lights at sundown, and turn them off later at night. That's convenient in general, but also serves as a bit of security.

All of them connect through to Alexa, which allows for an extra bit of automation and on-demand control.

Maybe one of the best features we use the automations for is to slowly turn on lights in the morning for a gentle wake-up
My wife uses Alexa to play music in the morning as an alarm for those times when we have to get up earlier. Very convenient - just blurt out "alexa, wake me up at 7am with the song 'xxx'"

  No discussion including Alexa would be complete without the obligatory inclusion of Saturday Night Live's Amazon Alexa Silver skit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvT_gqs5ETk

dougw said:

I don't see much value either

I don't use them either but I could see them being very useful if you have or end up in future with a disability.

I have an Alexa system and a Google Home Assistant system. I got into it to explore the technology. Neither is turned on at the moment - my better half did not like them and I don't see much value either (even though I already have the hardware). I ran them for about a year and found I never used them, except as a novelty. The only thing I want remote control of is Christmas lights, but I don't need Alexa for that. I did enjoy the novelty of asking them odd ball questions, but that was mostly about exploring their limitations.

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. 

This is my area of expertise. 

Alexa is a the most established platform if you just want to get going. 

I am a Google and Amazon instructor and both platforms work in a very simular way.  Having developed "skills" (Amazons term) I can tell you its much easier todo with Amazon (AWS). Google are behind in terms of the development put into the platform. 

There is a current move to self hosted systems like thouse from Home Assistant. 

The Apple home ecosystem is a nice idea but currently poorly executed. 

Its really a bit of a mess but Alexa is the one I would go for if you want something that "Just works" 

Any questions any one has I would be more than happy to answer.