Amazon and Google are both accelerating their smart home strategies, pushing further into local processing, Matter interoperability, and voice-first experiences. This Yahoo Finance segment breaks down where each platform is heading and what the competitive landscape means for homeowners building out their automation setup.
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Transcript Highlights
For years, the tech industry promised us the smart home, a world where your lights, thermostat, coffee maker, they all talk to each other. But for most people, including me, it never quite worked out. Too many apps, too many devices, and someone in the house always ends up becoming the unofficial tech support. That was me too. But now industry leaders like Amazon and Google are saying that artificial intelligence might finally fix all that.
01:03 Dan Howley. Yeah, there’s uh a bunch of different capabilities that are coming out uh from the likes of Google and and Amazon. Uh Amazon had relaunched Alexa. Uh it’s called Alexa Plus now. Uh and they launched some new capabilities alongside of it. The the gist of all of this is that, you know, AI should be a helper when it comes to either setting these things up or making sure they’re, you know, working together, talking to each other, uh more easily. It’s just still not exactly the the easiest thing in the world. And you know, I mean look, like you said, we’ve been talking about the smart home for for some time.
01:45 Dan Howley. Yeah, I mean, I’ve I’ve been I tried it. Uh I live in it’s not really great for an apartment in New York. Uh you know, I can’t automate locks here. Uh the landlord would probably get upset. But you know, different things you can do lighting, uh plugs. and I know some people who are power users who, you know, get a lot out of it. My one of my best friends uh tells his computer to turn on and off and his TV to turn on and off and Alexa does it, no problem. But I think for a lot of people it just ended up being too uh difficult to kind of put everything together and get it set up.
02:30 Claire. Yeah, so I mean at this point, I think we’re still stuck with a lot of those more legacy technologies. Um, you know, like you, I’m someone where I was told I could download an app and it would make my lights turn on and off and I just never bothered because I didn’t want to figure it out. Um, you know, maybe AI in the future will be able to make it a little more seamless, but right now we just have this app ecosystem that is very complex.
04:08 Speaker A Dan, what about, what about interoperability? Uh, a lot of these systems, they don’t talk to each other and it’s like you kind of got to go all in on one to the exclusion of the other and just not it’s something that I never wanted to deal with, honestly.
04:24 Dan Howley. Yeah, there’s there’s uh some standards where, you know, uh different companies will have their things work uh and be able to talk across different operating systems. But it’s still yeah, it’s still this just mess of of too many companies, too many different types of products trying to align. It’s like uh uh getting a box of Legos and no instructions and you’re like, okay, I guess I got to figure this out now. Um, the imagination uh element isn’t exactly something you want to do with your smart home. You want to be able to just put it together really quickly and efficiently.
06:10 Claire. Yeah, I mean I think it’s a pick your poison. Like a lot of smart homes are as simple as just having Alexa control the lights or something like that or um the one that I’ve heard of is you can get an app to control your oven. So like when you freak out and you leave and you think you left your oven on, that is something you can do. Um but you know, that being said, some of this stuff is is highly complex and that’s kind of when you need to bring in an expert to kind of sync it all up and and that will not come cheap in the modern era.
07:31 Dan Howley. I think there’s a a time will come where it does make it actually a lot easier and I think to, you know, navigate and understand. Look, it I mean, you can use AI and ask it how to set things up uh and it will for the most part, help you with it. you know, uh not necessarily doing it for you, but explaining how to do it. And I think, you know, when the the smart home idea originally came out, we had these insane pie in the sky uh products, you know, I don’t need a camera inside of my refrigerator to show me a screen of what’s inside of it from the outside.
08:57 Claire. You know, okay, so my thing that I’m curious about, I don’t know the answer to this, but we’re promised this idea of agentic AI, right? Like in the future, AI will know what you want and it will do it for you. So like, in the future, you know, maybe they will know the AI will know that I want my lights turned off at a certain time and they will be able to do that. And maybe that will be the true value add that we’re missing and get us past this moment where we’re just like asking Alexa to, you know, do that.
How HASMaster Helps
The topics covered in this video map directly to areas HASMaster tracks and organises:
- Platform choice — compare Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and local-first Home Assistant across Software
- Matter & Thread interoperability — see compatible devices and hubs in Devices and Infrastructure
- Home discovery journeys — start with a guided path at HASMaster home
[Add more specific HASMaster tie-ins after reviewing the full transcript.]