A few years ago, smart homes seemed like a novel concept only for the wealthy and technophiles, but with the advancement of modern technology, almost everyone can turn their home into a smart home with over 20% of UK household’s already having a smart speaker such as the Amazon Alexa and 57% of UK homes have a smart device, whether it be a smart kettle, robotic vacuum cleaner or smart lights.
So with smart homes becoming more and more mainstream in the UK, you may be asking yourself how you can join in on the trend and turn your humble home into the house of the future. Well, we have the answer for you, we’ve gathered some of the best smart devices that you can purchase in this year to help smarten up your home.
1. Smart Speakers
As mentioned earlier around 20% of UK homes already own a smart speaker of some sorts, usually one of the big 3 brands which are the Amazon Alexa, Google Home and the Apple HomeKit. These are essential for quite a few other household smart gadgets, as they can be used to control and programme other smart gadgets.
While these are referred to as ‘Smart Speakers’ they do a lot more than just play your music, these can be used to control other devices, tell you the weather, help plan your calendar, let you know how long your morning commute will be, order your shopping and even tell you jokes.
2. Smart Lights
Smart lights are a delightful innovation, they act like normal lights, you can turn them on and dim them from your regular light switches. But their ‘smart’ abilities is what sets them apart, using a smart speaker or your mobile phone, you can programme your lights, change their colour as well as regularly operate the lights.
While this may not seem like much on the surface, the ability to programme the lights is amazing, you can set them to turn on/off at certain intervals, for example: if you’re leaving the house for a few days, you can set your lights to be on during the evening so that any would-be thieves are deterred by thinking there is someone home, or when you get home from a long day of work, you can set your home lights to turn on as you walk into the house to stop you from having to fumble for the light switch.
3. Smart Blinds
Conclusion
These are another subtlety useful smart device, smart blinds are usually controlled with a remote control or from smart speaker connectivity. A set of remote control blinds or smart speaker controlled blinds are an amazing piece of technology, helping you let in the right amount of light.
These blinds can be programmed in various ways or simply controlled by input from a smart speaker or remote control. But where smart blinds really come into their own is their programming, setting them to rise or fall to certain levels at certain times, so if you want a nice early morning wake up, you can programme the blinds to open and let in the sunlight to wake you.
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