The dumb smart home

I’ve had an Alexa since the very first Echo Dot. It still runs, up in the loft, and it often has the best microphone in the house. I changed its wake word to Computer years ago, because I’m a Star Trek fan and it was always going to happen.

At a friend’s house, the same little speaker sets the pasta timer. That isn’t a criticism. It’s the reason for this piece, and I should say up front that I’m in an echo chamber. I have by far the smartest home of anyone I know, and my friends, quite reasonably, find it complicated and fragile.

What my friends’ houses have

Here’s what I’ve noticed in my friends’ houses. There’s an Alexa, and maybe a smart bulb in the living room. There are no motion sensors, the heating isn’t tied in, and there are no routines. Nothing under the sink to catch a leak, nothing on the windows, nothing watching the air. They don’t think of their home as smart at all.

The numbers say my friends are normal. YouGov’s survey of British homes in August 2025 found 35 per cent own a voice speaker, but only 14 per cent have a smart thermostat and 12 per cent smart lighting.

Ofcom asks smart speaker owners what they use them for. In 2024 the top answers were music, radio, the weather, alarms, questions and the news. Running the house isn’t among them, though Ofcom does find a smaller group who treat the speaker as a control hub for the home.

Fig. 1 · What the speaker is for

What gets me is how close they already are. A full-size Echo or a recent Echo Show probably already has the Thread radio that cheap sensors need, and Amazon lists which ones do. The older Echo Dots most people have don’t, though the Dot Amazon announced this week does. And the sensors cost less than a sandwich: IKEA sells a motion sensor and a door sensor for £7 each. Plenty of my friends have the capability. They aren’t joining the dots.

So here’s my case. Most people who say they don’t have a smart home already own one. They haven’t switched it on.

What switching it on looks like

I’ve written about the clever end of my house in Faking intelligence, where the front door reminds me what to take and the house knows I’ve been to the gym. That isn’t the end I’d recommend to anyone. The routines I’d miss most are the boring ones.

When I say Computer, bedtime, the electric blanket comes on, the bedroom lamps come on, everything downstairs goes off, and whatever music is playing stops. Computer, goodnight reads me tomorrow’s calendar, and that has saved me from forgetting things more times than I can count. When I stop the morning alarm, it reads out the day’s calendar and a news briefing.

Fig. 2 · Bedtime, in one word

None of those needs a sensor, and none of them can fail because a sensor didn’t notice me. That matters, because of the objection.

My friends are right

The honest objection is my friends’ own: a house full of routines is a second job. They’re right, and my own house is the evidence. When I started rebuilding my Home Assistant this autumn it was three years out of date, with six integrations still pointing at a machine that no longer existed. Even the new version had a sofa sensor that never noticed me leaving the room.

The cost was never setting it up. It’s keeping it working. An AI that writes a routine for you lowers the first cost a lot and the second much less. So my claim needs narrowing. The routines worth having are the ones with nothing to break, like bedtime. And the real promise of the AI isn’t writing the rule. It’s being there to read the rule back to you, in plain words, the night it goes wrong.

The spreadsheet precedent

The best comparison I’ve found is the spreadsheet. VisiCalc arrived in 1979 and put computing in the hands of accountants, and nobody called them developers. Most spreadsheets I’ve seen are still lists. A few get formulas. The ones that do quietly become load-bearing, nobody documents them, and they break when the person who wrote them leaves.

A routine is a formula in a cell. That’s the explosion I keep predicting, when anyone can say I want my house to do this when that happens and it happens. Everyone can be a developer now. The barrier isn’t being able to write code any more. It’s our own creativity in how we connect the services we already have, and whether those services will all answer to one hub, like Home Assistant or Alexa. The house is where most people will find that out. It’s also my friends’ objection, in the same picture: more people writing formulas means more houses held together by one that nobody understands.

Fig. 3 · The ladder

Who gets to write the formula

The big companies are betting you won’t write it yourself. Alexa+ came to the UK in March as early access. Once that ends it will be free with Prime, or £19.99 a month without. Amazon’s help page says that with Alexa+ you can make a routine by describing it, with the example Can you play music and turn the lights on in my bedroom every weekday at 7AM?

Panos Panay, who runs Amazon’s devices business, talks about ambient AI: the assistant leaves your phone and moves into the room. This week Amazon launched a screen for the kitchen and a clock for the bedside.

Apple’s answer, HomeView, goes on sale on 13 November at £299 and recognises up to six people in a household by their faces. The first impressions, before it ships, were lukewarm. I read a £299 box with face recognition as Apple settling in for a long game.

I should be candid about what they’re buying. My read is that Alexa+ in Prime is about owning the front door to the household’s shopping, and a routine that reads your calendar knows when you’re out. Alexa sends what you say to the cloud: Amazon switched off the last option to keep it on the device in March 2025. I made the case for renting your AI anyway in The Five, and for agreeing a family safe word in Trust nothing, agree a safe word. Know what you’re renting.

Start with bedtime

If you have an Echo and a couple of smart plugs, you can build my bedtime routine tonight in the Alexa app, or ask for it if you’re on Alexa+. Start there. Not with sensors, not with the heating. One word that does four things you were going to do anyway. The point isn’t the thirty seconds it saves. It’s that the goodnight one remembers what I’d have forgotten.

In much of the world a smart speaker is a long way off. Home broadband is often a luxury, and the GSMA says mobile is the main way, and in some cases the only way, most people in low- and middle-income countries get online. The only connected device in the house is often a phone. So this is a rich-world problem as much as a configuration one. But in most British homes the hardware is already on the kitchen worktop. It’s been listening for years. It might as well be useful.