So many smart home products people know and love rely on the cloud.
Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri rely on the cloud for language processing. Even many smart lights need clouds to turn on or off. Is it one thing when these cloud services provide some additional functions (such as storage or automation presets), but rely on them for basic functionality? That’s a terrible idea.
When Cloud Services Shut Down, What Do You Have?
Although smart home technology seems to have been around for some time, the industry is still relatively young. Many of the companies that came out of the initial wave of interest in the early 2010s were startups, and it is safe to say that several were created only to fail later.
These companies made products that now weigh slightly more than expensive paper. And it’s not just small companies. Low Iris has launched the Smart Home platform, just to do it Closed in March 2019.
Insteon announced the death of its cloud server a few months ago and iHome also shut down its services. Although iHome did not have a wide product range, Insteon was well known. Using wall cables to send smart signals is one of the easiest ways to transform an old home into a smart home. There is some hope left for Insteon customers – their devices will, at worst, become “dumb” switches – the same cannot be said for many other products.
It costs a lot to maintain a cloud server
It seems like everything is “Cloud This” and “Cloud That”, but maintaining a cloud server is not an easy thing. A single server can cost up to 400 400 per month for maintenance and a large company will have multiple servers. An average back-end infrastructure can cost $ 15,000 or more per month even for a medium-sized company.
If a product doesn’t make enough revenue (or a company relies on Kickstarter or Indiegogo funding), cloud servers will be one of the first things a company wants to do to reduce costs. When this happens, it is often the customers who suffer.
Features are cut off, functionality is reduced, and products offer far fewer benefits than you initially expected when you purchased them.
Bite the bullet and switch to on-device processing
While there are many advantages to using a cloud server, there are also many disadvantages. These are not as secure for one as processing on the device.
If smart home devices rely on local processing, the whole system is improved. I don’t need internet access to tell me to turn off the lights in my house, Especially If I have to dedicate a port of my router to a smart hub. What if the hub can’t relay a basic on / off command?
Alexa and Google Assistant devices can translate your commands into action without the need to relay through an external server. Natural language processing isn’t as difficult as it used to be, and newer-and-better chips provide dramatically more power without increasing in size. (This is also a good time to speed up Homekit to close the gap on competition and to point out that new M1 chips should be used in Siri processing.)
Perhaps the biggest indication that the path to on-device processing is that if a company closes its doors, the products still retain functionality. Customers will not be deceived by their money within two or three years because funding has dwindled or startup funds have run out.
Insteon, iHome, and Iris are just the tip of the iceberg. There is already considerable skepticism about smart home devices. If consumers do not realize that they are making a good investment, the industry will not grow and development will stagnate. On-device processing can give customers some assurance of their investment and continued effectiveness, even if the company does not create anything new.
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