It really is amazing what has gone on within the smart home over the past few years, as we really are experiencing a technology renaissance with all of the cool and interactive devices that are coming out today. From smart doorbells and locks to thermostats and even refrigerators, homeowners today can really turn their home into a connected ecosystem that learns and responds to their habits and patterns. With the leaps that have gone in technology, we may not be that far from the Jetsons after all.
One company that is leading this smart home technological revolution is Alarm.com, which provides a software platform that seamlessly connects the key devices in your home so they work together as part of a smart home ecosystem. The company also recently opened a state-of-the-art, 1,700-square-foot demo smart home in Falls Church, Va.
Connected Ecosystem
One of the major obstacles to greater smart home adoption has been a lack of interoperability between smart home devices, a problem that companies like Alarm.com and Z-Wave are helping to remedy, as they a provide a platform on which to build a total connected ecosystem of devices, from locks and lights to thermostats and household appliances. A Z-Wave-enabled device provides for seamless connectivity to any IoT device, such as thermostats and other energy monitoring devices.
One of the great smart home inventions of the past few years is the video doorbell, which gives the homeowner a real sense of control and interactivity with anyone in and around their front door and porch areas right from their phone. And what is great about video doorbells like the Skybell are the HD-quality images you can get today, combined with two-way audio and the ability to integrate the video doorbell within your complete smart home system and security system. This interactivity is changing the way people look at video surveillance in and around the home.
In addition to working with all Z-Wave enabled devices—and there are a ton to choose from—Alarm.com works closely with many leading lock manufacturers, including Kwikset, Yale and Schlage, to name a few, all of which can be added to your smart home ecosystem.
Voice Control
Whether you have Google Home or Amazon Echo, Alarm.com allows you to bring voice control into your smart home system. This enables you to use the voice assistant of your choice, such as Alexa, to turn off the lights, lock the door, or turn on your favorite radio station—whatever the need may be. And as these voice assistants get more sophisticated by using natural language processing, they can pick out accents, dialects, and learn each person in the home based on their voice and speech patterns.
Voice control in the home really is the future. In fact, findings from a Home Automation Report from the Connected Intelligence Division of the NPD Group, a market research company, found that 73 percent of smart homeowners already use voice commands, with 61 percent of those consumers expressing an interest in wanting to use voice to control more products in their homes and nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of smart home product owners used a smartphone (more on this next) to control or monitor their home automation devices.
Going Mobile with Smart Home Technology
One of the most appealing aspects of the smart home is being able to control it all right from your phone using an app, so you can use one screen to control everything at your fingertips. No matter where you are in the world—at work, on vacation, or just walking the dog—you control many aspects of your home, such as lights, locks and cameras, as well as get alerts and see video feeds from your video doorbell or other cameras in and around the house.
That added bonus of real-time video verification, whether it is confirming a family member is home, or alerting you to suspicious behavior around your home, is priceless and brings some real added value to these systems. Plus, video verification lowers false alarms greatly, which helps your monitoring company to be more effective.
Smartphone home security is not only compatible with today’s security systems, but also with many systems older than two years, which can be upgraded to become compatible with smartphone controls.
Big Data and AI
A key benefit to working with a dealer that works with Alarm.com is that you are benefitting from all of the actionable info the company has been able to learn from analyzing the incredible amounts of data gathered from the millions of homes that it services. Alarm.com’s Insight Engine is founded on the concept of using machine learning to create a truly intelligent home that can become fully automated based on your family’s habits, while alerting you to any anomalies that are detected, such as suspicious activity around a home.
For example, the system will learn that you very rarely leave your garage open after 10 p.m. and will alert you to this. Or, if your son always comes home between 3pm and 4pm on Mondays but does not, you can be alerted. This is where we really cross over from smart home to a fully automated, Jetsons-like world.
“The Insights Engine can be looked at as a new engine that we have running inside of our cloud that takes all of the data coming off the home or property and builds a model of what is going on in your home in particular, and is then able to pick out unusual events that we think you might want to know about without actually requiring that you do any configuration,” Dan Kerzner, Alarm.com’s chief product officer, said in an article about the company’s Insights Engine and future drone applications. “So you are getting responsiveness out of your home, and your home becomes an active helper as opposed to you having to give it direction.”
Find an Alarm.com Dealer in St. Louis, MO
As you look at the different security companies in St. Louis, be sure to work with an Alarm.com dealer, one that can easily customize a smart home security system based on your home’s unique configuration and family’s needs. In a perfect world, you want your integrated security system to work correctly every time—24-7—so be sure to check with local and proven security experts on the best options available for your family.
Butler Durrell Security is an Alarm.com dealer and would be happy to provide you more information about the latest smart home security features available. Contact us to learn more.
