The Internet of Things is now the Smart Home.

In the last year or so, we’ve stopped saying “the Internet of Things” and moved on to say “smart home” when referring to all those connected products we keep hearing about. It sounds like a similar catch-all phrase that encompasses everything from Bluetooth light bulbs to your Sonos audio system. Except it’s not. None of us live in a smart home, regardless of how many of those gadgets you already own. No, we’re a long way from that. We’re only barely living in a connected home, a netherworld somewhere between the IoT and the super cool smart home of the future.

Don’t be fooled though. This is an old-school rebranding exercise to obfuscate the fact we’re no closer to having a smart home than we were 12 months ago.

What’s the difference?

At the Smart Home Summit in London, which took place between September 29 and 30, both the connected home and the smart home were discussed at length. We can forget about the Internet of Things; that’s old news. What we’ve got now is the connected home, and that’s code for a whole mess of stuff that doesn’t work together, is confusing and expensive to buy, and is found in a market so dense that Googling the term “smart home” is enough to put even the most enthusiastic geek off.

To make our homes (and lives) smart, they all need to talk and interact with each other, seamlessly.

What’s the difference between a smart home and a connected home? It’s actually quite simple. Existing connected products, from those in the home to in our car, don’t communicate with each other very well. To make our homes (and lives) smart, they all need to talk and interact with each other, seamlessly.

Here’s how it’ll work. At the moment, a connected thermostat learns your regular movements, so it makes sure the house is warm when you get home at six. But it’ll probably be freezing if you come home unexpectedly at 4. The smart home would have had a good conversation with your car to know you were headed home early, and that it’s because you’re not feeling well, then adjust everything accordingly — if you had a fever, you wouldn’t want a baking house. To get the same result in the connected home, actions are required on your part, and forget about any of it working if someone else is already home and has changed the settings already.

Luxury future living

If that degree of autonomy and intelligence hasn’t got you excited about the smart home, and its benefits over the connected home, how about this. Think of the future smart home as the residential equivalent of living in a luxury serviced hotel, where all of the stuff you don’t want to do — organizing the washing, doing the grocery shopping, optimizing the heating, and maintaining a security system — is done for you, leaving lots of time for doing cool stuff. Or, at least, more work so you can pay for it all.

Suddenly, the connected home looks a bit rubbish, and the Internet of Things a quaint old phrase that’ll soon be consigned to the tech history books. When’s the smart home coming? Hold on. First, there needs to be a shift away from the gadget-orientated connected home, to a smarter, more thoughtful way of living.

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