Artificial Intelligence in the home: what to expect in the next 5 years

In October 2011, Apple released the first AI voice recognition software known as Siri. It can be argued that date marked the day that AI started to be involved in the daily lives of many people.

Since then we’ve seen AI evolve in many different forms – in terms of the capacity of understanding and what devices AI was embedded into. One of the more interesting aspects of the growing trend of AI is how it is becoming integrated into our homes. All types of devices from fridges to dishwashers are becoming “smart” with the help of AI. As the options for smart devices for homes continue to grow exponentially, what can we expect in the next 5 years?

Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants are becoming increasingly popular in the home. Voice recognition systems such as Alexa let you do everything from checking on relatives in the next room or on the other side of the world. They can help you keep track of your daily schedule, and even order coffee for you before you run out. Yet for the time being, virtual assistant devices such as Alexa don’t yet understand complex sentences and therefore conversational exchange are not yet possible. However, it’s expected that in the next 5 years speech recognition systems will become substantially more advanced.

In the near future, instead of typing in the search terms such as “homes for sale Seattle” people will be able to speak their search queries using more conversational phrases such as “What homes are for sale in Seattle for under $500,000?”. Subsequently, the way people are provided answers to their questions will become more advanced as well. Search engines will be able to deduce the topics of interest and come up with relevant follow up questions such as “Which area would you prefer to live in?”, “How many sq.ft would you like?”, “How many bedrooms?”, “How many bathrooms?”.

Home virtual assistants will become undoubtedly more efficient within the next five years and be able to help us with an array of everyday tasks.

Smart Appliances

Voice and pattern recognition have been implemented in many smart appliances to facilitate everyday life. We can see this in quite a few appliances already.

Smart thermostats, such as Nest, let you control your heating remotely and over time it reduces the need for you to control it at all because they learn when and how you use your heating.

Thanks to smart TVs you can put the remote down and literally tell your TV what you want to watch. You can control it with just your voice. You can tell the TV to play your favourite shows on Netflix, look up funny pet videos on YouTube, and much more.

In the future, we will likely see an emergence of this sort of technology with other appliances like dishwashers, washing machines, and so on. Basically, we will probably be able to tell all our appliances and other electronic tools what to do without lifting a finger. Our appliances could potentially be connected to our phones and that would be how we would communicate with them. Imagine a time when we could check the content of our fridge while at the grocery store. Meanwhile, our phone could provide us with a custom grocery list. Over time the AI appliances will all know our patterns and perform their tasks on their own without any voice commands.

Home Decor

In the last few years, we’ve seen the blossoming of AI art. It started with what is known as “style transfer” but has grown into something much bigger.

With artificial intelligence, we can now create custom original art at the click of a button. We are able to decorate our homes with custom artwork, not just photos or someone else’s art. With this new technology we are now able to become artists ourselves and create truly meaningful and one of a kind art. Instead of browsing an infinite amount of websites full of art that has no direct connection to you, you can simply pick an art style you like and upload the photo you want to be recreated as a painting. The AI will then create visually stunning artwork for you.

There will likely be an increase in other AI-powered customizable items for your home. Who wouldn’t want to create a completely personalized home.

Security

Our personal security and home security has always been a top concern. With AI this concern is slowly dissipating.

You can now equip your home with smart security cameras. These cameras have facial recognition capability that has the ability to not only discern between people, pets, and vehicles, but also lets you know not just that there’s someone in your home, but also precisely who it is. In effect, you will be able to know when your kids are home, when the cleaner arrives, and so on.

Smart security cameras also have the capability to notify you when a stranger is in your home. Smart cameras may be just the start of ways to improve the security of our homes. One day we will likely ditch our keys to replace them with fingerprint sensor such as the ones on our phones, or simply scan our phones on an access pad at the door. There are many possibilities in what the future will hold.

Looking forward

Artificial Intelligence will become undoubtedly more efficient in the future and it will be able to help us with a multitude of different tasks. Research in AI is continuous and will probably surprise us a little every year.

It’s also almost certain that we will see improvements in security and homecare. With all these new tools, businesses will be empowered, and it will generate new services. We can’t know for sure what will happen in the next 5 years but we can safely assume there will be many advances in technology.