Smarts that can save money on electricity and water (amongst other benefits) help make previously mundane items like washing machines more attractive.

After numerous false dawns, smart appliances seem closer to reality than ever before. Nick Ross explores this potentially burgeoning market.

In the early 1960s, the western hemisphere’s dream of an easier, automated world, spiked when TV’s The Jetsons animated a ‘Space Age utopia’ which illustrated humanity enjoying a more-productive work life and simpler household chores, thanks to an assortment of quasi-sentient appliances and proto-computers.

However, 50 years later, this vision has failed to materialise and most people would likely point towards robot vacuums as being the closest manifestation.

More recently, the paleo-future promise of smart appliances has been pushed by various, major white-goods and brown-goods vendors but they’ve not caught on. Could this be about to change? Has the rise of IoT helped? Did COVID-19 lockdowns play a part? To what extent are Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant responsible?

Market defragmentation

Yun Zhang is the chief executive and co-founder of Wyze – a specialist in digital transformation and critical infrastructure. In regard to the primary delay, he feels that smart appliance uptake has been affected by a fragmented marketplace as, with multiple vendors for various devices, you need an app for each to make them hum.

“However, smart speakers such as the Nest and Hub have helped to provide the ecosystem with a central platform but it still all requires a little bit of set-up to make it work seamlessly, regardless of the device or appliance vendor,” Yun says.

But he feels that this is changing and the future is bright for such smart devices: “They’re becoming easier to integrate with Google Assistant and Alexa, for example, while initial set up for certain devices can take as little as 20 seconds, requiring minimum fuss for many homeowners and occupiers.”

The dominant smart speakers have certainly played their part: Google’s, Amazon’s and Apple’s digital assistants have all progressed from being gimmicks, curiosities and play-things of geeky online communities to world-renowned characters on mainstream TV. They’re useful, accurate and friendly enough for any Luddite or technophobe to interact with. Also, they now all integrate with every significant smart device ecosystem rather than ushering users towards sibling products.

At the same time, appliance vendors like Samsung have moved away from early aspirations of dominating the smart appliance space and recognised that they’re better placed to make products that aren’t hamstrung by the limits of any single ecosystem. When Samsung’s first smart appliances appeared, they smacked of gimmickry and were also linked to the company’ ‘Bixby’ digital assistant which initially strove to rival its quasi-sentient, digital-assistant peers but faltered because, among other things, it could barely recognise its own name.

At Samsung’s recent 2023 TV launch, it was a very different story. The TV displays were surrounded by all of Samsung’s smart appliances which included computer monitors, refrigerators, washing machines, tumble dryers, robot vacuums and even a smart wardrobe. They were all linked in multiple ways via the SmartThings ecosystem. The latter was bought by Samsung in 2014 and nowadays interacts with numerous other vendor products including the likes of Ring and Sonos.

Aaron McNamara, head of product, audiovisual, at Samsung Australia explains: “We’ve always designed our products to work together. But, the more smart devices that people have, the more they’re finding it really overwhelming and hard to manage. So, part of introducing our SmartThings hub into the TV itself is trying to bring that back under control and make it easier for everyone to use.”

Yun says similar: “There are some manufacturers, like us, who also develop and sell multiple devices – from vacuum cleaners to security cameras and mesh networking devices – which can now operate and be managed from a single app, making fragmentation less of an issue for those looking to streamline their devices into one single source.”

Most ecosystems (including the smart speakers) now also integrate with the general IFTTT (If This Then That) functional language of IoT and, more recently, Matter.

Matter’s initial origins date back to 2019 when Apple, Amazon, Google, Samsung’s SmartThings and the well-established (low-powered, machine-to-machine-focussed) Zigbee Alliance, formed a working group that was initially called, “Project Connected Home over IP.”

The subsequent rebranding to Matter heralded, not only a nominal move from techie terminology to a household-friendly moniker, but an almost-simultaneous global realisation from major tech brands that no one could possibly dominate a market which encompassed everything from TVs and speakers to WiFi routers, control panels, industrial smart switches, smart watches, smart phones plus the dumbest level of smart lightbulbs, pressure gauges and other basic sensors.

COVID-19’s big cybersecurity push

COVID-19 lockdowns undoubtedly boosted adoption with many homes smartening up with techie upgrades. However, another shot in the arm was simultaneously provided by advances in cybersecurity and an explosion in cyberattacks and scams caused by lockdown.

Last year’s Integrate conference in Sydney provided a stark reminder of how far the professional AV industry is lagging behind its IT and IoT cousins in terms of network security. While many signage, lighting, sound manufacturers and distributors were gleefully showing off their latest products (with long-awaited Ethernet ports and wireless network connectivity!) the Cybersecurity industry was hammering home the importance of implementing Enterprise-grade “Zero Trust” security policies across organisations’ networks to ensure that catastrophic compromises could no longer occur due to things like a single, hacked, AV device.

The corporate solutions pushed many new methods of network authentication. Behavioural security became a buzzword and involved using A.I. to detect when a logged-in user or connected device started acting out of the ordinary. Zero Trust meant that nothing could connect to a network unless it was a pre-registered device. These became essential considerations for organisations whose workforces were suddenly all working from home and dialling in with caveman-like security practices like usernames and passwords.

However, another major contemporary catchcry was Edge computing which is where computers, at the edge of a network, could secure all the dumb devices and smart sensors connected to it. Any compromised device could be identified and locked down before it infected anything else and firewall rules meant traffic could only be sent one way – data could be ingested to a central repository but not exfiltrated.

Edge computing proliferated in the enterprise space but exploded across the IoT world where, for example, building sites had to instantly digitise and replace contaminated paper trails with swarms of smart sensors. There was also considerable uptake in people’s homes where many new and upgraded consumer routers leveraged partnerships with cybersecurity providers to build Edge-like security into home WiFi to protect smart home devices while Samsung KNOX represents an example of in-house-developed security tech.

This all comes at a time where the general public is paying more than a passing interest to data security. Massive customer data breaches to the likes of Medicare and Latitude just keep on coming and make the lead news items on the evening news. The reality of countless compromised webcams is so mainstream that it even formed the plotline of the recent Netflix thriller, Luther: The Fallen Sun.

But manufacturers are pushing the security factor as a selling point now.

Gulrez Tyebji is the country manager of Reebelo Australia. He remarks: “While security and privacy have long been major concerns (and caused hesitancy) around smart devices and the IoT, I believe we’re seeing a shift where the benefits are outweighing the negatives; for example, increasing accuracy with home security systems, saving on energy bills (at the very top of everyone’s agenda today) and being able to control various appliance functions remotely, are all examples of how smart devices are adding value to our lives, rather than putting them at risk.”

Efficiency gains

‘Usefulness’ was a common theme in conversations with smart appliance vendors but saving money and efficiency is emerging as a major selling point. While, Samsung’s new smart wardrobe can help reduce someone’s ironing load, more people are relating to its smart washing machine and dryer. These now have the ability to identify and filter-out the microplastics which come off clothes and exit through the drain into our water supply. The technology can be retrofitted to dumb washing machines to the point where governments may see value in helping to finance their adoption.

Of even more interest to both bill payers and governments will be the ability for a washing machine to monitor its water for cleanliness and dynamically reduce the length of a washing cycle accordingly. The water savings and electricity savings from doing so would be considerable across the populace.

Yun adds that, despite price hikes caused by supply chain issues and inflation, the costs of the technologies are historically dropping. He says, “Prices are also coming down due to cost reductions, making the devices and appliances themselves accessible to all, which is particularly key in Australia amid a period of inflation and higher cost-of-living impacting discretionary spending.”

He concludes: “It’s a massive market already and will only grow from here; Telsyte forecasts the Internet of Things at home (IoT@Home) market will reach $4.4 billion in Australia by 2025. So, the future is bright.”

Perhaps, that 1960s vision of the future is closer than we think.