The best smart home trends

The best smart home trends of 2019 & what to expect in 2020

The year 2000, “Imagine waking up, waving your hand, your lights and TV turn on, your kettle starts to automatically boil from a click on your mobile device and your blinds slowly open…” Well, it’s 2020 and this crazy ‘20 years ago fantasy’ is a tech reality!

With 2019 wrapped up, the decade saw an upsurge in smart technology thriving in the market. From smart speakers and displays, smart doorbells and bulbs to smart ovens and fridges, your everyday homeowner has started shopping for smart home devices. This doesn’t mean that the novelty has run thin, innovation is at it’s highest peak with incomprehensible smart technology hitting the market all the time. So, here are some of the best smart home trends of 2019 and what to expect in 2020.

1. Adding Camera Shutters | Smart Displays

There are two different types of people, those who stick little stickers over their laptop camera and those who don’t. We all hear stories of people hacking into other peoples cameras and spying on them so it’s easy to understand why this trend took off. Most companies, such as Amazon, seem to be making these shutters standard in their displays. It’s sometimes the simple, non-tech reliant features which make the user feel at ease and with the flip of a switch you can have one less privacy concern.

2. Gesture Controls | Smart Displays

A lot of smart displays have begun adding gesture controls, which means that holding your hand in the air to turn down the music is the better option over trying to vocally shout over the Imperial March in your tech den! One of the biggest trends is using these controls in the kitchen - having dough smudged over a tablet screen isn’t the nicest of sights and being able to just lift a hand to pause/skip music is a lifesaver.

3. Using Echolocation | Smarter Gadgets

This sounds simple, but it blew our minds! One recent development from Google’s smart home technology was the use of subsonic sound waves which can locate users in a room allowing devices to respond contextually by displaying larger text if you’re far away from the screen! This simple feature is the reason Google is top of the tech chain! It’s a really exciting time for this area of smart technology as you begin to ponder what the future holds and how far can this technology really go.

4. Smart Lights & Switches | Cooperation

If you own smart bulbs you’ll probably have run across the issue of killing the power to the bulbs through flipping off the switch - this disables your fancy automation and voice controls as they won’t turn back on no matter how loud you shout! This is where the trend of smart switches beamed over the market with products with dimmer switches wirelessly pairing with bulbs to turn them on and off at the wall without the power being killed.

2020 | What To Expect

So, 2020 is upon us and with the trends listed above thriving in the market, what other smart technologies have we got to look forward to this year? Well, we aren’t going to see Tesla’s futuristic-looking cybertruck until around 2022 but there are a few talks of the future surrounding advertising through smart speakers, 5G will finally be meaningful, supporting phones with faster connections, more autonomous things such as human-carrying drones and the ever-evolving AI security changes in the business world!

It’s evident that the best way to predict the future is to create it, and with that, we will see what the big tech companies have to offer this year.

Source: Smart Home Expo