Tag Archives: smart-home

A First Look at Matic, the Reengineered Robot Vacuum

Within a few minutes of arriving at the WIRED offices in San Francisco, Matic cofounder Mehul Nariyawala brings up the classic Paul Graham piece on schlep blindness. The essay talks about how engineers will often shrink away from starting a company to tackle a very commonly understood problem simply because …

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How to Set Your Thermostat—According to Science

The house in New Jersey came with a menagerie of control panels. Pallid little rectangles with fuzzy LCD screens, of varying brands and designs. Some were decades old, and there were six of them in total, dotted around various rooms. Joe Truncale, a customer engineer at Google, remembers trying to …

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The Pros and Cons of Apple’s HomeKit Secure Video

If you're shopping for indoor or outdoor security cameras, video doorbells, or a mix of all three to cover your property, finding a system you can trust is tougher than it should be. Between security scandals, shoddy software, expensive subscriptions, and laggy feeds, you'll struggle to find a bulletproof security …

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These Motion Sensors Finally Made My Home Feel ‘Smart’

My progress toward a truly “smart” home has been painfully slow. I’m sick of unreliable voice commands, flaky smart switches, and poorly designed apps. Where’s the seamless experience that was promised? As my wife often points out, if it’s not easier than flicking the regular old switch or drawing the …

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How the Apple TV 4K Quickly Became My Favorite Streaming Device

For years, I've had recurring problems using smart home devices on Apple’s HomeKit ecosystem. A string of security cameras and video doorbells, most notably the Logitech Circle View Doorbell, would work fine for periods, but they'd inexplicably fail to record video or would randomly disconnect from the network. I chalked …

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Amazon Upgrades Alexa for the ChatGPT Era

When Amazon launched the Alexa virtual assistant nine years ago, its ability to decode voice commands to set a timer or play a song seemed almost magical. Today, the bar for impressive language skills is much higher, thanks to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Amazon is giving its voice assistant a reboot that …

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