Last year I counted the internet-connected devices in our house. Twenty-three. Not because we're unusual — because everything comes with a chip in it now. The doorbell. The thermostat. The washing machine. The toothbrush.
Most of these devices are, to be polite, not very smart. They're connected. They have an app. They occasionally ping a server in Ohio to tell it about our laundry. The "smart" part is largely aspirational.
This is where AI comes in — not to add yet another chirpy notification, but to make the devices we already have do their jobs quietly and well.
What AI actually changes for connected devices
When we first got the "Internet of Things" wave a decade ago, most devices were essentially sensors streaming data to the cloud. The cloud did the thinking. The device was dumb.
AI — particularly the edge-AI we talked about in an earlier post — lets the thinking happen on the device. That changes a few things:
The device keeps working when the wifi drops. A smart thermostat that only adjusts temperature when it can reach the cloud is a bad thermostat. An AI-enabled one decides locally, quickly, and stays useful in a power cut.
Private data doesn't have to leave. A smart speaker that has to upload every word spoken nearby is not a smart speaker you want in your bedroom. On-device AI lets the keyword spotting happen locally, so only the intentional queries ever reach the cloud.
Response is instant. Cloud round-trips take hundreds of milliseconds. Local inference is instant. For anything safety-related — a baby monitor, a smoke detector, a fall-detection pendant — that gap matters.
What makes a connected device feel genuinely smart
I've been collecting these, because they're rarer than you'd think.
A thermostat that learns your schedule without you programming it. Nest did this well a decade ago, and the pattern has been copied since. It works because the intelligence is quiet — the device observes, gradually adjusts, and only occasionally surfaces a question.
A doorbell that knows your family. Recent doorbells run face recognition locally and only alert you when someone unfamiliar arrives. The key detail: they don't send the face data anywhere. It lives on the device. That's what makes the feature okay.
A hearing aid that adapts to the room. Modern hearing aids run AI models that distinguish speech from noise, quiet restaurants from loud ones, familiar voices from strangers, and adjust their processing dozens of times a second. Life-changing for people who use them.
A water leak detector that calls you before the insurance claim. A moisture sensor in the basement, a simple on-device model, and a single clear alert on your phone. No dashboard, no fuss.
What makes a connected device feel stupid
Also a list.
Notifications about things you don't care about. Most smart devices have default notification settings optimised for the manufacturer's engagement dashboard, not your peace. A "smart" device that tells you every time it does its job is not smart.
Features nobody asked for. The smart fridge with a screen nobody uses. The washing machine with twelve "AI programs" that do the same thing as a normal cycle.
Surveillance dressed as convenience. Some devices collect far more data than they need, and use it in ways they don't clearly disclose. If the privacy policy is longer than the manual, that's a signal.
Cloud dependencies for trivial tasks. A light switch that takes a second to respond because it's asking a server whether you pressed it. This is an insult to the physics of electricity.
If you're building connected devices
Three things we find ourselves repeating in client conversations:
- Inference where the data is. Keep it local unless there's a clear reason to move it. Every byte you send to the cloud is a privacy, latency, and reliability cost.
- Invisible AI is better AI. The best smart devices don't announce their intelligence. They just work better. The user notices, eventually, that life is quieter.
- One notification a day, or none. Respect your user's phone. A smart device that builds trust by keeping its mouth shut will be loved. One that nags will be uninstalled.
The version I want to live in
A house that's a little more careful on my behalf — that catches the leak before the carpet's ruined, that warms the bedroom before I wake up, that notices the elderly relative who hasn't moved since yesterday morning. All of this, running locally. Very little of it ever reaching anyone's server.
That's the ambient, gentle, useful IoT future I believe in. If you're building towards it, we'd love to help you think it through. Book a chat.
