You've seen the ad: A family is vacationing out of town and the parents suddenly wonder if the house is locked up properly. They use their smartphone to remotely activate the smart locks and security system.
Or this one: Someone rings the doorbell or merely approaches a home, and the homeowner uses a smartphone to speak through the video doorbell system -- even when not at home -- perhaps bewildering the visitor (or potential intruder) who can't tell where the voice is coming from.
There's also the "Calling Ashley" commercial for Amazon's Echo Spot:
Reams have been written about how great it is to use your voice to control your home's smart devices; how your smart, Web-connected fridge can monitor its contents and be programmed to replenish stocks automatically; how you can control your home's smart lighting and locks with your smartphone; and how your smart Internet-connected appliances can be controlled -- and even repaired and maintained -- remotely.
This picture has a dark side, though, as many Alexa-powered device owners recently found when Amazon Web Services' U.S. East region experienced a widespread outage that knocked out service to their gizmos.
Amazon's servers were down for a large part of the morning on the day the outage occurred, taking Alexa-powered devices out of commission. Incidents like this may occur more often as the popularity of smart home devices grows.
Overall, 75 percent of security device sales include at least one smart home device, according to Parks Associates.
Smart speaker shipments totaled 32 million units in 2017, 300 percent up year over year, Strategy Analytics found. Google and Amazon accounted for 90 percent of sales. Google's market share increased to about 35 percent in Q4, while Amazon's share fell to about 50 percent. Meanwhile, there were a host of new entrants to the market.
"The most common feature for smartphones right now is smart devices," noted Michael Jude, Michael Jude, research manager at Stratecast/Frost & Sullivan. "After that, it's smart lighting, security and then other things."
Intelligent agents like Alexa have a "rather low penetration rate of about 9 percent," Jude told TechNewsWorld, but that number "is growing fairly quickly."
Frost projects a worldwide market of nearly 1.8 billion smart agents by 2025.