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The future of ‘smart homes’? Amazon’s Alexa built into new apartments

The future of smart homes is here as tech behemoth Amazon announces collaboration with an Australian property developer. Photo: Getty

The future of smart homes is here as tech behemoth Amazon announces collaboration with an Australian property developer. Photo: Getty

The future of home automation could already be here, as Amazon partners with an Australian property developer to roll out ‘digitised’ apartments equipped with the tech-behemoth’s voice assistant.

Caydon Property Group has inked a deal with the Jeff Bezos-owned online shopping giant to equip 1205 new apartments in Melbourne’s Moonee Ponds with Amazon’s Alexa and Echo Plus cloud-based voice services.

The voice-control technology will allow residents to “interact with fixed features and furnishings” such as lights, blinds, music streaming and smart TV activation, the company said.

According to Caydon owner Joe Russo, Australians are embracing home automation “in droves”, with voice-control technology a “pivotal part of the digital living experience that buyers are demanding”.

“Smart speaker sales have risen sharply in Australia and worldwide as consumers appreciate the benefits of having a cloud-based voice service to stream music and information, provide cooking recipes, and increasingly control automated home features like lighting, temperature and even window and door locks,” the company said.

From ‘voice control’ to ‘thought control’

The integration of Amazon’s Alexa into Australian homes is just a taste of what’s to come, according to Professor Hussein Abbass, an expert in artificial intelligence at the UNSW-Canberra School of Engineering and Information Technology.

“There will be an exponential growth in the innovations that will come with these technologies with minimum cost to the consumer,” Dr Abbass said.

In the future, the voice-control technology used in Alexa could be replaced by “thought control”, he said.

“If we project the science that we have today, the voice control in Alexa could be replaced with thought control, with smart brain-sensing technologies such as EEG that could issue the commands without speaking a word.”

Worldwide more than nine million ‘smart speakers’ were shipped in the first quarter of 2018. Photo: Getty

The main benefit of “smart home” technology such as Alexa, Google Home and Apple’s HomePod is the increase in comfort that comes with the use of the technology, Dr Abbass said.

“Without lifting a finger, you can connect to thousands of applications in the cloud,” he said.

However, privacy and security concerns continue to deter some people from installing such technology in their homes.

In May, an Amazon Echo user in the United States had snippets of her conversation recorded and shared to a random contact in her phone, despite Amazon initially denying that such privacy breaches were possible.

Earlier in the year, a number of Alexa users reported hearing the device ‘laugh’ unprompted in their homes.

“We’re aware of this and working to fix it,” Amazon said in a statement at the time, later claiming the device was mistakenly responding to what it perceived to be a command to laugh.

Security and safety is an “obvious technical drawback” of having such technology in homes, Dr Abbass said.

“Being voice controlled, the voice could be mimicked. Being reliant on the internet, a vulnerability in the router in your house could be used by a hacker. The third party services [called Skills] sitting behind Alexa, and there are thousands of them, could be designed inappropriately,” he said.

Despite such concerns, Australians should be “cautious and aware, not alarmed” when it comes to using voice-control technology, Dr Abbass said.

“From your mobile phone, computer at home or anything that you connect to the internet, there are always security and privacy concerns,” he said.

“There is risk in everything. ‘Smart homes’ is no different. The better educated we are in these risks, the better we can enjoy the technology while mitigating the risks.”

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