AI is making home life easier than ever. We’ve all seen smart thermostats or robot vacuums. With AI, those types of simple products can become contextually aware of what’s happening in the home environment, analyze the data it’s receiving, and decide how best to operate given the information it has. Here’s a look at five ways AI helps both homeowners and renters save money, stay safer, and even get more fit at home. Installing a basic smart plug with Alexa, for example, can help you track how long a particular device is on and how much energy it’s consuming. You can adjust energy amounts used in lighting by adding smart bulbs to lamps or adapt heating and cooling with smart thermostats. Then there is Currant, the advanced smart plug that’s also an energy meter designed to help you understand how much energy you’re using in your home. It uses artificial intelligence to identify devices pulling power unnecessarily and shuts them down when they aren’t needed. Don’t have time to check information from various smart plugs? Try a Smappee. It’s a single-home AI metering device that recognizes the electronic signature of different devices in your home and can send you alerts if you leave the iron on or forget to turn off the TV. A home gym system like Tonal, for instance, monitors your workout, looks for signs of struggle or fatigue as you lift weights, and automatically decreases the weight if it thinks you’re having a tough time. Tonal can also analyze your positioning and tell you to move to a different spot or adjust your body to ensure you’re correctly targeting the right muscles and prevent injury. Video home security systems like Spotcam have gone beyond simple motion detection. They are now using artificial intelligence to understand the direction of the movement it sees, recognize the faces of visitors to your home, and listen for specific sounds (i.e., that crying baby) so it can notify you when something is amiss. This functionality is a big step beyond video doorbells, which have become hugely popular in recent years, into a world where home security is intuitive and intelligent enough to know when the actual danger exists. We’re not talking about the $300,000 kitchen robot, which can not only cook all your meals but tell you when you’re running low on ingredients; we’re talking about simple devices like the JuneOven. This AI device uses machine-learning artificial intelligence to recognize and prepare foods just the way you like, automatically switch between cooking modes when needed, and let you talk to the oven using Alexa. Place multiple foods in the JuneOven, and it instantly recognizes what the foods are, cooks them to your taste, then sends you smartphone alerts to let you know when it’s time to put the food on the table. It even records live and time-lapse videos so you can see how the food is progressing. These tools are, in some ways, becoming old-hat for consumers who have grown used to seeing them in homes and on commercials. What’s new here is companies are increasingly using AI to find more advanced ways to get homes spic-and-span. iRobot, for instance, offers Roomba AI ‘bundles’ to allow its robot vacuums and mops to work together without human intervention to get things cleaned up nicely. It’s also developed a new AI-powered platform called Genius Home Intelligence which identifies specific furniture pieces and lets you remotely verbally direct your device to ‘clean up under the kitchen table’ or ‘vacuum in front of the couch.’ That’s a helpful assistant to have when a guest is coming over unexpectedly and you don’t have time to get everything picked up. Which AI device will grace your home in the future?
