Want to Boost the Commercial Appeal of Your Smart Home Product? Make It Work with Alexa!

To succeed in the competitive Home Automation market, a novel connected home solution should exchange data with 3rd-party gadgets and be easy to set up and operate. In an ideal world, the device should also learn homeowners’ preferences and function with little to no human intervention.

What we have now is a fragmented market awash in standalone devices. These gadgets often use different connectivity technologies, fail to function in context, and are over-reliant on mobile apps.

Does pairing an LED bulb to a mobile app really make it smart?

Until recently, Nest thermostats that use reinforcement learning to create custom operating schedules were the closest we’d come to smartphone-less Home Automation. And then voice user interfaces (VUIs) emerged.

Although some IoT experts argue consumers want a home that reacts and adapts appropriately to their needs rather than a home that responds to voice commands, the latest market statistics tell a different tale:

• According to Juniper Research, in just three years voice assistants will live on 8 billion devices globally (up from 2.5 billion gadgets in 2018)

• Last year, 40% of US consumers had smart speakers, which amounted to over 120 million devices across the country. 75% of respondents reported using the devices daily

• 44% of consumers turn to smart speakers to manage other connected devices in their homes: TVs, lights, thermostats, etc.

While Google Assistant and Siri clearly dominate the smartphone assistant market, Alexa leads the way in the fastest-growing voice assistant segments: smart TVs, speakers, and wearables. In particular, the Amazon voice assistant lives on 61.1% of smart speakers in the USA, which makes it the go-to solution for startups looking to create a voice-controlled Smart Home. Project Management Institute (PMI) even listed the Alexa Voice Service among the most influential technology projects of the past 50 years for making voice-activated computer interface a part of everyday life .

Here’s How Voice Control Improves the Smart Home User Experience

Technology-wise, a voice-operated connected home relies on two components: a device with a built-in microphone and speaker, and a digital voice assistant living in the cloud.

To activate an Alexa-based smart speaker, you must start with the wake word and formulate your request. The device captures your voice command and delivers it to the cloud. The voice assistant recognizes your intentions, correlates your command with a certain Alexa skill, and acts on it. With Alexa, you follow a predefined pattern:

• Wake word: Alexa

• Intent: order pizza

• Custom request parameters (slots): pepperoni from Domino’s at 5 PM

The voice assistant captures your words, digitalizes the sounds, and analyzes the information in the cloud. Through this sequence, Alexa can reply to a trivial question (Is it going to rain today in New York?) or trigger an Alexa skill to perform the desired action for instance, connect to the Domino’s servers and order a pizza.

Instead of opening your Domino’s mobile app, looking for a particular pizza, and placing the order you can just hand over these tasks to Alexa. This type of interaction is more efficient and more human’ in nature than any other form of a user interface!

Besides providing answers to searchable questions, voice assistants notably, Alexa have become an interoperability platform for miscellaneous Smart Home devices. Using the voice interface, you can operate the entire suite of IoT devices in your connected home, as long as these devices are compatible with the voice assistant of your choice.

Compared to Siri and Google Assistant, which remain fully merged into the proprietary ecosystems, Alexa works with one hundred thousand 3rd-party devices, ranging from Whirlpool microwaves to Rivian electric trucks.

Why Choose Alexa for Your Smart Home VUI?

• Amazon makes it easier to integrate the voice assistant into 3rd-party products. Although Siri and Google Assistant both beat Alexa in the voice assistant IQ tests, which include questions about local businesses and events, and evaluate the assistants’ ability to perform commands, Amazon prioritizes device interoperability. Last year, the company even added Alexa Voice Service (AVS) integration to the AWS IoT Core platform, thus enabling developers to create voice interfaces for any connected device regardless of its form, size, and computing power.

• You can train Alexa to execute custom commands using the Alexa Skill Kit (ASK). With custom Alexa skills, you can send requests to different connected home devices powered by AWS and control them remotely: adjust the brightness of dimmable lights, change thermostat temperature, and check whether the front door is closed.

• You can prototype and design a custom Alexa-based voice capturing device. If you don’t want to operate your Smart Home gadget via Amazon Echo, there is a plethora of development kits for AVS, such as the Intel Speech Enabling Dev Kit and the Cirrus Logic Voice Capture Dev Kit. These hardware components allow Smart Home startups to reduce device development costs while implementing advanced features like 360-degree voice pickup and algorithmic noise reduction.

Integrating Alexa into a Connected Home Solution

To make your connected device work with Alexa, you can:

• Add Alexa to a Smart Home device using the AVS SDK, which is a no-brainer

• Create a custom Alexa skill and integrate it with your IoT infrastructure

We’ll focus on the latter here.

To perform a command correctly, Alexa needs to access the data gathered by IoT devices within a Smart Home system. This could be done by means of a custom IoT infrastructure underpinning the logic of your Smart Home solution or with the help of AWS services.

In the first case, Alexa skills are implemented as web services. A smart speaker captures your command and sends it to your proprietary cloud, where the data produced by connected devices is also stored. The system and the voice service communicate over an HTTP connection, which is secured using SSL/TLS protocols. Based on the input, the voice assistant comes up with a relevant response. Thus, all data processing is performed locally.

If your Smart Home device is based on AWS IoT Core, there’s an option to allow Alexa skills to directly access the information stored in AWS S3 and a database (for instance, DynamoDB) using AWS Lambda functions. This way, voice commands will be processed by Amazon services.

Things to Consider When Designing a VUI for a Smart Home System

From the user experience perspective, there isn’t much of a difference between mobile app and voice interface design: you still need to figure out who your customers are, what intentions they have, and how they are going to interact with the connected home system.

To create a VUI that will add value to your custom Smart Home device, you should:

• Create a list of tasks your customer base should be able to accomplish with Alexa. According to ComScore, only 27% of voice assistant use cases fall under routine Home Automation. Besides telling Alexa to turn off the lights, users might want the service to replenish everyday household items or book a ride with Uber. Therefore you should design multiple dialog flows representing conversations between users and the machine, and predict where these conversations could potentially go.

• Understand Alexa’s limitations. Like other smart assistants on the market, Alexa is following strict, unwavering linguistic laws: every command should be preceded with the wake word, followed by intent and content parameters. Also, human engineers are not yet capable of building natural language processing (NLP) algorithms that fully understand the aspects and complexity of human communication.

• Put users in control. Unlike graphical UIs that help users navigate technology solutions, voice assistants have no way of showing users how to order a pizza or get a three-day weather forecast. As a result, your customers talk to Alexa the way they would interact with a human. When faced with an unfamiliar task or request, the system will choke. To prevent situations like this, you can design a VUI that gives users an alternative (you get a weather forecast for three days or for a week) or provides an exit option.

• Consider adding visual feedback to a VUI-based Smart Home system. Voice-only interfaces are largely unsuitable for performing complex tasks like booking a medical appointment or arranging grocery delivery. To help users interact with voice capturing devices, consumer electronics companies combine voice recognition technology with screen-based UIs, which indicate the gadget is actually listening and allow users to confirm or reiterate commands.

Last but not least, some third-party skills available for Alexa may force smart speakers to spy on users and intercept sensitive data, including passwords and credit card numbers. According to PwC, 28% of consumers do not use voice-enabled devices due to privacy reasons.

Despite the growing security concerns, voice assistants have become ubiquitous, and will continue to reign in the Home Automation market in the near future at least until Apple releases its self-configuring connected home.