is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News.
The holy grail of the smart home is ambient computing — technology that disappears into the background, anticipating your needs without a word or a tap. Lights turn on as you walk in, doors unlock as you approach, coffee brews before you reach the kitchen. This is the proactive home: a space that adapts to its occupants to support their comfort, health, and safety. The tools exist to create this, but today’s smart home remains complicated, unreliable, and often invasive — still a long way from truly “ambient.”
But, just as it’s changing every other game in tech, advances in artificial intelligence are a watershed moment for the smart home. The rise of AI agents that tap into language and visual models is the technology that could take us from the command-and-control era of home automation to living in the Starship Enterprise, where our every need can be served by Star Trek’s Computer (assuming that’s what you want).
We’re not anywhere near there yet, but at this week’s IFA consumer tech show in Berlin, Germany, I expect to see companies talking about how they plan to get there. While every announcement will likely feature “AI,” I’ll be looking for those with real potential to make products better, smarter, and easier to use, while keeping data local and private.
I’ve already started to see glimpses of how AI can improve the smart home. New features on my Ring security cameras, powered by Visual Language Models (VLMs), mean they can tell me what’s happening instead of just showing me. I now get a notification with a generated description of the event — such as “a brown chicken is pecking in the garden.” It’s a lot more helpful than “motion detected.”
Today, my Nest video doorbell can alert me when a package has been removed, as well as when it arrives. When I pair it with an ADT security system, the doorbell is smart enough to recognize when my neighbor’s at the door and unlock my smart lock so she can put the package inside my house.
Of course, some of this is machine learning, which isn’t new in the smart home. The Nest Learning Thermostat has been learning your routines and adapting your heating and cooling automatically for a decade. Alexa’s hunches feature has been telling me things I might have forgotten to do — lock the door, turn off the lights — for years now.
However, the context and awareness that new LLM- and VLM-powered assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa Plus and Google’s Gemini for the Home, could unlock has the potential to take us to the next level. If we want the vision of the Enterprise, we need Star Trek’s Computer.
What happens at home should stay at home
Tech giants Amazon, Google, Samsung, and LG are building platforms that coordinate and process data from all the sensors, appliances, cameras, and devices in your home. Today, some of these systems can go beyond simple command and control to recognize patterns, automate routines, and anticipate some of your home and family’s needs based on learned behaviour as well as programmed automation.
This could range from simple tasks, such as brewing your morning coffee when it senses you’ve woken up, closing the blinds when it detects you’re asleep, to more advanced features like potentially sending a repairman to fix your ice maker at the right moment, or managing how your home uses energy.
At IFA this week, LG is showcasing its Affectionate Intelligence, powered by its FURON AI Agent, and Samsung will likely be promoting how its SmartThings home automation platform integrates with its Home AI system to help automate your home more easily.
If we want the vision of the Enterprise, we need Star Trek’s Computer.
Of course, these AI-powered platforms raise privacy concerns. Most rely on the cloud for the processing power to implement AI features, meaning the private data your home generates — who is home, what they are doing — may not stay in the home.
However, unlike in the mobile world, the home doesn’t need an always-on cloud connection. AI processing on the edge is becoming increasingly viable as technology continues to mature. At IFA this week, I’ll be looking for smart home applications that use local AI models. If you’re going to showcase the importance of privacy in the smart home, Europe is the place to do it — it has some of the most robust data privacy protection in the world.
Another major hurdle to this whole-home vision is infrastructure. For a home to respond to its occupants, it requires sensors and data points throughout (one reason why the South Korean appliance giants already have a strong foothold). Just last month, a new smart home company emerged that’s looking to solve this problem.
From the team behind the August smart lock, Doma is an AI-powered system that relies on hardwired mmWave sensors throughout your home to predict what you want it to do next. Precise enough to detect your breathing, this type of sensor could track nearly every activity in your home. But it’s a big ask to expect people to add devices and sensors everywhere. These types of solutions seem best suited to new construction or high-end remodels. It would be a lot easier to use devices already in our homes.
Philips Hue could announce a new tech at IFA that does exactly that. Its rumoured MotionAware sensing will leverage radios in its millions of existing light bulbs to turn them into motion sensors for your home. The idea is to have your lights turn on and off based on where you are, but the potential of all these data points is a mouthwatering one for anyone looking to build a proactive, ambient smart home.
Matter may also help here. As an open-source interoperability standard, it can connect the common devices we bring into our homes, providing a platform for future AI agents to tap into. Cameras will also be key to any company’s vision of AI in the home, generating richer data for VLMs to interpret. Amazon and Google have a head start in this area with their Ring and Nest cameras, which is likely why Apple is eyeing cameras as its next move in the home.
While we wait for these futuristic visions to become more than a vision, more focused applications of AI can help more people get more out of their smart homes — by using LLMs to cut through the complications and busywork many smart home devices require.
For example, Govee and Aqara added chatbots to their apps in the last year to help you access their capabilities, and I’ve just started playing with Philips Hue’s new AI assistant, which launched in the US last month. As a rule, a chatbot popping up in an app is a dealbreaker for me, but I’ve found it surprisingly handy with Hue. It turns out simply typing what I want my lights to do and have it actually happen — “set good makeup lighting on my vanity” — is much easier than fiddling with sliders in an app, navigating through endless screens, or asking a voice assistant to try, and likely fail, to do it.
With companies like Reolink, Aqara, and Eufy announcing new products at IFA this week, I expect to see more innovations leveraging the context and knowledge AI can provide to make it easier to keep your home feeling safe and secure.
Of course, there are still big questions around the reliability of AI in the smart home. A single mistake in an AI-driven home can have real consequences, and recent reports of AI going off the rails underscore that risk. I’ll be looking closely at the safeguards companies are implementing to secure this technology. The smart home doesn’t need artificial general intelligence — just enough intelligence to move from reactive to proactive, and finally deliver the Star Trek promise.
