Controlling Your Home With Your Voice

Part of the pipe dream of home automation is the ability to talk to your home and have it obey your commands. I talked a little while ago about the Amazon Echo, which offered a sort of watered down version of that. It responded to voice commands, but only in the way something like Siri would. No real home control there. Now, there's a new home automation hub making its way through Kickstarter called Zenno, which offers something a lot closer to the dream of true voice control.

On the surface, Zenno is just another hub that connects your smart devices to the internet. The difference is that instead of just allowing you to press buttons on your phone or tablet to control your home, the Zenno app will actually respond to voice commands. This is different from the Amazon Echo, which had microphones built into the device. The advantage of using the microphones inside of your phone is that the mic is always with you, so you don't need a device in every room of your house to listen to you. The downside is that you'll still need to take out your phone and launch the app before you can say a command.

The other problem that I see with Zenno is that it doesn't use any of the standard protocols for communicating with smart devices. Instead, each unit is actually an IR blaster like you would have in your media center. That means that Zenno can only control devices that respond to an IR remote, like your TV or your stereo. There are very few smart devices out there that respond to IR signals. It also means that you need one of these Zenno hubs in every room of your house, at least every room you want to be able to control. So the fairly attractive price of $70 per hub is actually deceiving, because you're going to need more than one hub. And so we keep reaching for the pipe dream...