Rich Kennewick, President of Voicebox Technologies, examines key innovations in the smart home and connected consumer markets for the annual CONNECTIONS: The Premier Connected Home Conference, held May 23-25 in San Francisco: 

What do you think is the biggest driver for the adoption of connected products for consumers?

Home automation with voice-first devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home. By creating a unified access point to connected products they are eliminating friction by mitigating app fatigue and allowing the utility to be realized.

What does the industry need to do to speed up the slow growth of overall smart home adoption?

The industry needs to look to see if it’s possible to open protocols and focus on better compatibility. For example, if WiFi was not a standard for wireless, networking applications would be limited. If we want to drive further interoperability of smart home experiences with seamless universal access things have to just work.

What are the best use cases for consumers and the Internet of Things?

Automation of everyday tasks. With the proliferation of sensors, the ability to build machine learning models will transform consumers experiences. There is not one best use case but instead it is the network effect of having increasing sets of ‘connected things’ that can be programmatically interacted with.

What are the greatest obstacles to the adoption of connected products and services in the home?

Hard to install and setup and incapability. Generally lacking a cohesive unified interface. 

Rich will participate on the panel "Voice Control: Improving the User Experience" on May 25. Other panelists include Amazon, Google, Nuance Communications, and Microsoft.

For more information on how to attend this session or the larger CONNECTIONS conference, visit www.connectionsus.com.

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