When Smart Moved In - The Living Room Has a Listening Problem

The open plan was supposed to bring the family together. Kitchen, living, dining — one big room, no walls, everyone in the same space. Architecturally, it worked. Intelligently, it’s a disaster.

There are five “smart” devices within earshot of each other and not one of them knows the big picture.

Speaker listening. Thermostat sensing. TV streaming. Lights on. Roomba under the couch pretending to be in snooze mode until the cat walks by.

Someone is cooking, another doing homework at the all too familiar “waterfall island”, and another is watching TV. Three activities, one room, and every light is on the same switch.

There’s nothing “smart” about it and certainly nothing intelligent. It’s an electrical plan from 1987 with a speaker stuck in the corner.

What would make it intelligent?

An open plan that reads the room.

Not metaphorically — literally.

Tuesday evening, I’m alone on the couch. The system knows it’s just me because the entryway said so. Lights dim. My show queues up. The fireplace turns on because it’s below 60 outside and the system learned that’s my threshold. The TV volume sits where I like it, not where six people needed it last Sunday when they screamed at a livestream of a sporting event.

Saturday evening, those six people are back. The room knows. The thermostat drops two degrees because six bodies generate heat. The lights stay up. Music plays instead of the TV. The fireplace stays off.

The room adjusts itself because it understands the difference between Tuesday and Saturday.

And let me talk about the TV.

The single biggest design failure in modern interiors is a 75-inch black slab mounted at eye level in the room where people are supposed to relax.

An intelligent living room hides the TV. Behind a wall, a panel, or art — I don’t care. When needed, it emerges, does its job, and retreats. Like a skulking figure from The Hobbit. You know it’s there. You just don’t need to see it when it’s not working.

Thermostats, in most houses, are a heavily protected device. Those select few worthy of control must survive a rite of passage. My current “smart” device shifts by whoever yelled at it last.

An intelligent room negotiates.

Who’s present?

Are they an authorized user?

What is necessary for a room occupied by 1 versus 10?

Or better — zone the space. The couch area and the kitchen do not share the same setting because the person cooking doesn’t need the same temperature as the person under a blanket.

Technology for all of this exists.

Intelligence to automate it doesn’t — not yet.

Not in any consumer product I can buy.

The open plan is likely the hardest room to make intelligent because it’s the room that does the most. It’s a kitchen, cinema, office, dining room and homework station. One space. Six functions.

And right now, zero intelligence coordinating any of it.

Next — the room we all dread. The laundry.