Let’s create a scenario. It’s the morning of a workday. You are scheduled to be at work at 9 a.m. The home assistant running on your HomeKit HUB, checks with your digital scheduling assistant what’s your program for today. It also checks with your digital health assistant, running on your phone, getting the information that you’ve had a rough night and are probably not very well rested. Checking with the car’s digital assistant, it finds out that there shouldn’t be any traffic problems this morning. With this information, it decides to wake you up a little bit later than normal. (Perhaps you’ve set a rule that in case you’ve had a good night’s sleep, you want to be woken up half an hour earlier so you can get a short, intense workout in before going to work.) You are woken up by the lamps slowly turning on and the blinds being opened as the morning news start playing on a screen in the bedroom. As you jump into the shower, the coffee machine starts making you a fresh cup of java. When you’re sitting on a bar stool in the kitchen, having breakfast and looking at your schedule for today, the car starts warming up, because it’s a cold winter morning, and it knows you’ll be out in 15 minutes. In case you’re are not showing signs of leaving the house, the car assistant will get the home assistant to gently remind you that it’s time to leave for work.
As you leave for work, the house sets itself in an “away” mode, with the lights turned off and the heating turned down. It knows the car will let the home assistant know when you are on your way back home.
Does this sound like science fiction? Couldn’t we do most of this today? What do you think the smart home will look like in 10 years?
Good day! This is my first comment here so
I just wanted to give a quick shout out and say I genuinely enjoy reading
through your articles. Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that go
over the same topics? Thank you so much!
Thank you. I think Reddit is a great resource for this topic 😉
Hi Stefan
This is somewhat off topic, but I couldn’t find anywhere to post it. Using a shortcut, I would like to toggle an accessory on and off by referring to the accessory using a variable. As an example, I have a heap of down lights named DL-mn where m is the row number and n is the column number based on the arrangement in the ceiling. It’s easy to concatenate the terms together to make the full reference (eg DL-49), which can be in a variable (let’s call the variable myLight). But the question is, is there a way that I can “set” myLight as an action?
Hi Chris,
That’s a great question! Right now, I don’t see a way of doing that in with HomeKit Shortcuts. Too bad because I could see some really cool shortcuts with this functionality. I have a feeling it might be a too advanced feature, at least in the near future, and instead we might hope to get the ability to do more with grouping lights, put the same light into more than one group.
Anyway, thanks for a great question.