The Bad – Using smart speaker as smart home’s portal

Nowadays, we are increasingly inseparable from the smart speaker. With strong potentials in playing audio, understanding humans’ commands and transmitting instructions, smart speakers are widely applied as a portal of smart home, working as a digital housekeeper to control other smart furniture. However, since this product is not mature enough, this housekeeper sometimes makes some mistakes, sending out wrong instructions to other furniture, and make furniture operate incorrectly or even the worse, letting them out of control. It is still not a reliable product, at least it has shown significant unreliability while serving as a smart home portal.

My own story may help to illustrate this argument. I am big fan of IoT technique and have made all my smart furniture access to network, using my smart soundbox as the smart home central controller. Out of my personal habit, I placed this soundbox on my desk in my room for the ease of access, where I also put my own PC and its speaker. Once a time I was watching video with this computer, without notice, the smart soundbox was activated by the voice in the movie, maybe some lines from the characters, and it was coincidentally given orders. However, since the volume of the soundbox was set to low level when I was using other devices, I didn’t notice that the soundbox had been activated. After I finished the movie and stepped out from my room for the dinner, I astonishingly found the air-conditioner and TV in the living room had been turn on and had work for a while. It was a scary experience when I recalled of it. “What would happen if the activated devices were not TV and air-conditioner?”, I was always wondering.

This experience might work as evidence to prove the unreliability of the smart speaker. The smart speaker still has so many issues to be tackled within the process starting from voice recognition, commands comprehension, instructions conversion and transmission in IoT systems. In my story, the speaker mistakenly accepted the order from wrong voice, then generated and transmitted wrong instructions. It should arise our attention that even though the smart speaker is powerful, it is still not yet reliable. We should be more cautious when arranging some important jobs for it.