I don't think a "Smart Home" and Home Automation is the same thing

[Arjun]

The days of Alexa, Google Home, etc are long gone - I feel like the ones that still use the darn thing just enjoy "convenience" - but home automation is more in line with surveillance and security - do you all agree with this statement?
I never use Home Assistant for "Alexa, turn this off, turn this on..." I have all of this nonsense disabled. I have all smart home IoT devices local and not on the cloud.

 

[jpc-s4]

I am not sure there is a 100% accepted definition. There are many different positions on this. Some people want everything to happen automatically-- sensors everywhere, geofencing, etc. to lock/unlock doors, turn on/off lights. etc. Other people just want to sit on their ass and be able to control everything within the house from a dashboard with little automated. While there is a place for Alexa (or equivalent) in either situation, it is just another type of control. It really isn't very smart on its own.

With respect to the issue initially raised by this video, that's his own fault for not setting a proper plan in the first place and then executing it. And his assumption that Alexa is some sort of special thing is severely misguided. My system works well for me; that is not to say that it will work for others, but it satisfies my use case. Better yet, I have pretty high WAF with it.

 

[whoami ™]

I guess it all comes down to skill level and the types of thing a person is exposed to. I would put my HomeAssistant setup in the top 10%, and there are some things I run on the cloud. But I also have a segregated network behind pfsense with white listed firewall rules and intrusion detection. Most of my automations revolve around security, this it true. But I also have automations that do things like pull gas prices from api's of the gas stations I buy gas from. I built a app inside homeassistant that tracks my mileage over onstare and by me logging every time I fill-up on gas and reminds me when to do service and give me data, like how much I spend on gas, gas milage, operating cost ect. When i click a button to log fill-up homeassistant pulls my location off gps, sees what gas station im at, pulls the price per gallon from api off the gas stations website and prefill the filed, stuff like that. I have another automation that tracks my work hours and is accurate +/- 30min over 14 days just off gps location and bluetooth connections from my phone and GMC truck. Might sound simple, but its about 934 lines of code to be exact. There were a lot of edge cases I had to account for. ¯\(ツ)/¯ I even use the voice thing but mostly just over android auto while im driving, like hey google, set security alarm armed/away. Which enables the cameras IN my house through BlueIris and arms my honeywell vista 20p. I integrated google assistant into homeassistant using google assistants SDK, but now that they are switching to Gemini Im going to have to revisit that since Gemini is smart enough to know it shouldn't have access to things like security alarms.