Magical World #30: Our home just became a whole lot smarter (with video demo!)

Childhood memories

I remember going to this 'museum of the future' when I was a kid, and there was a door opening and closing by voice commands. I remember thinking it was so cool and imagining how in 300 years, people would walk around their homes telling their devices to do things and those devices would listen.

I had no idea these futuristic elements were already available and so easy to set up in your own home! Yesterday morning I opened a package at work, and 24 hours later the home make over is already complete! So, what happened exactly?

A surprise

It all began with buying a new phone, and getting a box delivered to the office which was much larger and heavier than I expected, and which came with a surprise: a Google home mini. Which I had heard about, but hadn't seen in action yet. First thing we discovered was it answers questions, like what will the weather be tomorrow. Or, after connecting to my phone, what do I have in my calendar for tomorrow. Connect it to Spotify, and you can also play your favourite music by giving voice commands. So far so good.

The Google home mini: it's rather tiny

The next surprise: Ikea

My husband loves gadgets and smart solutions. He looked into what else is possible with the home mini, and found out about organising the lights around the house and controlling them through the smart home device. As he mentioned this and was looking at which lamps we would need in that set-up, I mentioned we should just wait for Ikea to make those similar smart lamps for much cheaper. Then we found out we are kind of behind on things - Ikea already has those smart light bulbs!

So while driving home from work, taking the new phone and the Google home mini with us, we stopped at Ikea. And bought ourselves a bunch of smart light bulbs, and some new lamps also, went home and as I made us dinner, my husband started connecting the new network.

Setting up the network

So many possibilities!

So, what's the result we get for all this effort?

• All the lights are now individually and in groups controllable through voice commands and also an application on our phones
• All the lights can be adjusted in brightness (from 0 to 100%) ...
• and in colour (white daylightish, a warmer colour for evenings when you still want to get something done and an almost orangy warm colour for romantic evenings)

Sounds cool right? After all the info, I'm sure you'd like a demonstration. This one includes giving clusters of lamps a voice command:

The video is in Dutch, but you'll get the idea

Audio

We connected the new lights yesterday evening. And liked it so much, we decided we would upgrade our audio also. We went to the store and got ourselves a JBL speaker with a Google smart application. It also connects to the Google home mini, so now we have dolby surround and we can voice command it. The quality of the speaker is actually surprisingly good.

The JBL speaker, which connects to Google smart

So within 24 hours, our home became a whole lot smarter! In the future, maybe in our next home, it would be fun to connect many more items to the smart home system. Like the heating system, or kitchen devices. Now, first thing is to get the tv connected.

Would I recommend?

When we went to the store this morning for the JBL speaker, the place was packed. And every 5 minutes or so, some people walked out the door with this huge new television set. So maybe it's the time of the year to update our home systems. If you're thinking about making any changes around your own place, I can really recommend a smart home solution: it took little time to install, works really well and now I get to tell my devices what to do while I'm sitting on the couch. No need to even lift my hand using a remote control.

One side note is, after saying 'hey Google' and 'OK Google' a lot, I tend to 'hey Roland' and 'OK Roland' my husband too. Just a thing to keep in mind when making a similar upgrade - I'm not yet sure how this new way of relating to devices will influence my people skills.

Thanks for listening along! See you in the new year!