Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests enter my home

Re:Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests e... by balabaster on Thursday October 17, 2019 @01:29PM (#21284336)

I have an Ecobee rather than a Nest, but I had the Nest before I moved and the one thing I note is that it having access to temperatures and weather outside the house means it can choose just to run fans to circulate the air from outside to regulate the temperature inside instead of running the heating or AC. If it knows the outside temperature is the temperature you want inside, it can just shut everything off. A dumb thermostat only knows what the inside temperature is... or more specifically, when the little coil bends to connect the electrodes, it trips the heating on until the coil bends the other way and disconnects them. If the external temperature was sufficient, your thermostat could've chosen to circulate external air into the house instead of running the heating.

Also, it knows when you're not home, so it can then just shut down everything until temperatures would cause other problems such as frozen pipes.

Additionally, you just dial it to where you're comfortable and if you get too hot or cold, adjust it again. It learns what temperature you like it at at certain times of day, it takes a week or two to really get to know you, but once it does, it just keeps the temperature comfortable and you rarely have to touch it or even look at it after that without you needing to go through a complex programming process like you do with most other thermostats.

That's pretty much what a smart thermostat gets you.

Whether or not you consider that useful or a good use case for your needs is really down to your own evaluation.

I like that my thermostat is smart enough to be able to regulate the temperature in my house without needing to kick on the AC or heating, which reduces my power consumption somewhat and is somewhat better for the environment, but is also better for my wallet.

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Re:Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests e... by _-___________-_ on Thursday October 17, 2019 @01:38PM (#21284428)

The system in my house just has an exterior temperature sensor. You don't need an Internet connection to know the temperature outside your house, and the "outside temperature" it's getting from the Internet may be quite different than the temperature of the air outside your house anyway.

Knowing when you're home can also be done quite well without any Internet access - just see if your mobile device recently associated to the wifi.

These things can trivially be built without the privacy concerns. The business model might be a bit harder if you can't collect the data, though...

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Re:Google chief: I'd disclose smart speakers before guests e... by balabaster on Thursday October 17, 2019 @01:40PM (#21284455)

Of course, I'm not discounting these things, nor am I suggesting it can't be done other ways. I'm just saying that this is what you get with a smart thermostat that you don't get with most non-smart thermostats.

The thing I really liked about the Nest is that I just turned the dial to where I felt comfortable and it just took care of everything else for me without me needing to do anything. As long as you're brave enough to put screws in a wall and hook up a handful of wires to connectors, it took about 15 minutes of me getting it out of the box to it being installed and configured. I can't say the same about any other programmable thermostat I ever had. Seriously it wasn't an awful lot more complicated than the mercury switch thermostats I've installed.

The handful of Honeywell programmable thermostats I've installed had a disastrously bad user experience. In fact, I installed the Ecobee in my current house because I got so pissed off going through the programming cycle of the Honeywell I gave up before I got to Wednesday :'D

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