After the Smartphone, the... Smart Home You already can't do without your connected phone, tomorrow you'll be addicted to your connected home.
Don't make any errors of taste: pronounce it correctly Smart Home... and especially not home automationyou would immediately be seen as a has been !
A booming market, which according to the Statista Smart Home Reportis expected to grow from $33 billion last year to more than $112 billion in 2022, representing average annual growth of 27.5 %!
We won't dwell too much on these figures - the reality over time is always very different from the forecasts, remember the market for tablets or connected watches which quickly ran out of steam.
The driving force behind this expansion is - at least, if we are to believe the specialists and geeks who are equipping themselves with them - the new connected loudspeakers, which are loudspeakers in name only: we should be talking more about voice interfaces, or even intelligent assistants.
Behind - or inside - the Google Home and Amazon Alexa are state-of-the-art artificial intelligences that allow anyone to communicate with these magical little boxes.
What actually is a Google Home? A Google query window? Except, of course, that instead of typing on a keyboard, you just speak - in a slightly weird way, of course - and it's a Google Home. "Ok Google you imagine yourself saying "Ok Marcel" or "Ok Paulette every time you talk to your friends? -but it seems more "natural.
The essential difference is that while Google online offers you a multitude of answers - including a few sponsored links - Google Home will suggest... the one that seems best suited to you: based on what criteria?
To better meet your needs, Google or Amazon will get to know you better, which in French means: track you! After all, you have to feed the little artificial intelligence that nestles in the heart of all these magnificent products.
A signed study Ghostery and answering to the legitimate name of "Tracking the Trackers, points out that on the old Web - meaning the one you use every day - 77.4 % of pages loaded contain activity trackers: "Smile, you're being tracked !
The overall champion is... Google - but who would have doubted it? - with nearly 65 % of pages tracked, well ahead of Facebook (a mere 28.8%) and Amazon (10.5%); our French leader in retargeting, Critéo, comes a long way behind, with just 6.5%.
In your Smart Home, it's not just Google or Amazon that will be generating and tracking data: there will be your fridge, your boiler, your shutters... in fact, anything that can learn from your behaviour and act accordingly, ordering beer when it's low or locking the shutters as soon as it gets dark and you're home.
Google or Amazon will know everything about your actions... but nothing about what you think of them: because they won't have access to your opinions about them - hopefully for a long time to come.
