Agreed. I'll add to that a healthy application of the Principle of Least Astonishment. If you have a light, there should be an obvious light switch nearby that turns the light on and off, and does so even if your home automation system is offline for whatever reason.

"Smart" devices should, wherever possible, function as dumb devices if for whatever reason they can't be smart. There are a whole lot of devices that simply become bricks.

"An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs. You should never see an Escalator Temporarily Out Of Order sign, just Escalator Temporarily Stairs. Sorry for the convenience."

I know it’s a joke but if the failure mode is “brakes don’t work” on an escalator full of people, it is much worse than stairs

Very true— I would definitely imagine that escalator brakes are a thing that fail closed in the absence of power, but clearly there are failure modes (probably a rare confluence of multiple concurrent failures) where this kind of thing can happen, such as that incident in Rome in 2018:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1SjQfwLieU

Another in China in 2017

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADb57ysvCbU

https://coconuts.co/hongkong/news/engineer-gets-2-months-in-... (misleading URL, actually suspended sentence)

Rather that than an falling elevator, but it still doesn't look fun

Rhasspy is an easy to use open source, fully offline, suite for this with wake word detection and integration with home assistant.

I've never understood the desire to control systems by speaking to them in code words. Speaking monopolizes a shared channel, requires diverting your conversation, and is really slow.

For practically anything that involves using code words to tell the computer what to do there are better input methods, like physical switches, or purely automated.

This is slightly off-topic, but in your opinion what are some of the reasons people prefer to use voice input with code words over the other options ?

Physical switches rely on light as a handshaking method.

When the light is off, the switch is invisible and you have to guess at where it is, or where you need to be walking (hitting your shins on things, or stepping on lego)

Using a non-light based interface means it works just as well when the light is on and off, vs being a broken experience for half of the usecases

Cooking. My hands might be occupied or dirty etc, but I need to set or change a timer.

Yep. Cooking is what I use Alexa for. The main control is homeassistant, but it forwards some lights to Alexa for me to control ober voice.

Or washing dishes; pretty much anything in the kitchen.

Thanks for helping me to understand this better.

1. Hands are dirty/unavailable (like other mentioned cooking) 2. The physical controls are physically across the room 3. The physical controls can't be located easily (lost remote, dark room)

Another point, the cognitive load of speaking a command is different than pecking through menus on a phone or finding the right button on the remote/device. It may be easier to just speak out load depending on your state if mind.

If I'm curled up comfortably with my SO, and don't want to take ten minutes of unwinding, doing whatever, then tucking back up together...

It seems like in that case a remote control could be placed nearby -- are you also using voice activated code words to control the television ?

> are you also using voice activated code words to control the television ?

I happen to have backed a Kickstarter that will hopefully enable me to do just that ;)

If you're interested in getting more quickly and WANT to write software, you can have the Raspberry Pi control most televisions over HDMI-CEC using libcec [0], and then you just need the voice recognition stuff mentioned above (Rhasspy [1]).

I had to do something similar (minus voice controls) to keep my existing remote's volume controls working with an analog volume device [2].

[0] https://github.com/Pulse-Eight/libcec [1] https://github.com/rhasspy/rhasspy [2] https://rkeene.org/viewer/tmp/cec-volume.cc.htm

Unless your SO is sitting on the remote

Agreed. I've been really happy with Ikea's Tradfri line. It's all on Zigbee, works without internet and doesn't need an "Ikea account". However lights and blinds only for now, plus they have perpetual shortages.

And get some motion detectors. Your lights should come on when someone enters the room and the light is below a threshold. I usually hit the off switch by the door when I leave, otherwise if no one is present the lack of movement will dim and then turn the lights off. It's 2021 people!

Motion detection is not presence detection. I still want the light even if I'm sitting still, such as reading a book or using a computer.

We use the motion detection to turn on lights and usually turn off manually. I've set up ours to remain on until a fair amount of inactivity. In two years it's only turned off once whilst we were watching a movie.

Do you not move when you're asleep?

Don't use the motion detection/automatic in bedrooms.

This is how the Honeywell stuff seems to work, at least for my thermostat. As long as there is some local wifi, thermostat and controlling unit will work, even if you cannot contact them from the internet.

What happens if power goes out, the units stop working if WiFi isn't on a UPS?

This would definitely be a problem in cold climates where a dead furnace could lead to frozen and burst pipes.

The unit is event-driven, so no, you would just lose the ability to change its current programming. Regardless, it can be bypassed on the actual boiler heater, it's just a thermostat. It's a decent set of compromises, definitely better than anything going "no internet, no service".

In my case: No power would mean I have nothing to control anyway. The only reason my local network is down would be my power down. That happened twice in the last 16 years.