[retrac]

I can see that. But I hope it never becomes standard.

I find them aggravating because of my disability.

An acquaintance has made every light in their home integrated into Google's services. I have a mild speech impediment and Google seems incapable of recognising my speech as speech. "Hey Google. HEY GOOGLE. Hey Gooooogle! Turn off the lights." I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. "Hey Goooooooogle! Turn. Off. The. Lights.". I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.

And of course, when I gave in and used the switch, my host immediately came upstairs and chastised me for causing device errors to pop up in the network. Use voice!

Not terribly impressed, to say the least. And don't get me started on the bank's voice recognition system on the phone.

[pessimizer]

You're an edge case, like the old, the young, the computer-illiterate, the very computer-literate, people who speak English but deal with a lot of things that aren't in English, and so on...

[andrewaylett]

I'm struggling to understand their stance :(. The point of "smart" is that it makes things easier. If it doesn't make things easier, what's the point? And as a guest, it had better make it easier for you.

For what it's worth, which obviously isn't much, all my public rooms have smart switches as well as being able to be controlled by voice. And if someone needs to use the physical switch (they're all still uncovered and accessible) then that's a failure of my system not of whoever needed to bypass it.

The main benefit to me of smart is that I can automate transitions, so it's that much less likely that anyone will need to manually adjust the lighting.

[vidarh]

This is a problem because your acquaintance have used smart bulbs instead of replacing their switches with smart switches. Lightwave rf switches and similar can be controlled with Google/Alexa or their own app, but still have buttons to push as well. I absolutely understand your frustration with that.

In terms of understanding, it'll improve. I have a broad Scandinavian accent. My Alexa handles that just fine for the most part. It's not more than a few years ago most speech recognition struggled with that (I remember a phone booking line that insisted on recognising me saying "London" as "Birmingham")