What Can You Connect To A Smart Home System?

Technology Blog

Looking through the products at a smart home store, you'll see that the marketing materials emphasize the importance of connectivity. The devices themselves offer extensive connectivity to many other systems, but you may be surprised by just how diverse the options now are.

Smartphones

Unsurprisingly, there are plenty of reasons to make sure that your go-to smart device, your phone, can talk with everything in your house. Nearly all items from a smart home products store have interfaces and apps that make using them on your phone easy.

These are sometimes proprietary apps from the manufacturers of the devices in your home. However, many systems allow phones to act as universal controllers without adding apps. The devices will talk with each other over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, and you can use your phone to handle operation once they've handled the handshake.

Similar options are available for tablets, laptops, and desktop computers. These often offer access to webpage-like interfaces that can provide more robust control options, too. In some cases, these are needed for the initial setup of access to security features and accounts.

Your Car

The ability to operate a smart home from your vehicle is a major benefit of modernizing your residence. If you want to have the thermostat turn up 15 minutes before you get home, for example, that's easy to do. This can be automated, with the car telling the home that you're approaching. Similarly, you can do it by command through the vehicle's voice assistant.

Most Entertainment System Components

Interoperability among the entertainment systems in a home is a big deal. After all, you'll want to know that the sound system is going to play nicely with your television. Similarly, you might have a home media center that provides access to streaming apps. It's great if you can pass streams from one device to another, such as throwing your favorite show over from the TV in the living room to the one in the kitchen when you start preparing dinner.

Home Assistants

Many people use assistant systems like Google Home or Amazon Alexa to integrate their smart devices. One of the strengths of this approach is that it tends to unify everything. Rather than needing to learn the commands for each device, you can simply have the assistant act as an intermediary. It also adds greater functionality, such as adding grocery ordering to an appliance like a smart fridge.

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19 March 2021

Understanding Technology Every Day

After I started having problems following other technologies, I realized that I needed to work harder to stay on top of new information. I began focusing more seriously on reading different literature about technology, and it was really cool to see just how much different companies could help. We updated our software programming and installed some new equipment, and it was nice to see how much of an improvement things made. I wanted to start this website to help other people to understand and apply new technology each and every single day. Read more on this blog to find out what you might have missed along the way.