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12 Influential Smart Home Inventions, and Why They Matter

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Being influential doesn’t always translate to direct commercial success.

This pattern is the most visible in the music industry, in which many trendsetting bands often fail to achieve mainstream popularity. Artists like the Dead Kennedys, Kraftwerk, and Captain Beefheart all pioneered genres, but this translated to limited amounts of fame and fortune.

Such a paradigm can also be seen in technology, where it’s simply not possible for every new product to become the next iPhone. Like music, some tech products are well before their time, while others serve as important sources of inspiration before they ultimately fizzle out.

Influential Smart Home Inventions

Today’s infographic from The Zebra looks at the smart home inventions helping to define the future of the nascent home IoT market.

The devices listed below may not all be massive commercial successes like the Google Nest, but many of them will be cited as influences in helping shape the smart home.

12 Influential Smart Home Inventions

The above smart home inventions range from inactive projects like the Jibo social robot, which ran through its $73 million of funding, to more commercially successful and widely available products like the Sonos smart speaker and the Google Nest smart thermostat.

While they’ve had differing levels of adoption and success, all of the above products are expected to be major influences on the smart home market going forward.

Smart Influence

To see why these products are so interesting, let’s take a deeper look into some key spaces:

1. Utilities

Before smart technology, most home utilities were controlled inefficiently and crudely.

However, devices like tado° and Nest have shown that temperatures should be optimized based on the habits of the people that occupy the home, rather than via manual controls. To accomplish this optimization, tado° adjusts air conditioning or heating based on how close a user is to returning home, while Nest programs itself based on the users’ schedule.

Theoretically, these both allow for significant savings on energy bills, and future smart home inventions will likely follow in similar footsteps.

2. Security

In the past, if you were gone for a long time, your best option may have been to have friends, family, or neighbors check up on the property.

In the smart home era, security is quickly becoming a priority so that keeping an eye on your property can be easier, safer, and more effective. App-controlled smart locks like August can grant access to visitors via “virtual keys”, while Cocoon senses disturbances in the home and alerts users via smartphone.

3. Health and Entertainment

You do most of your living at home, and the smart home aims to make this experience healthier, while also making it convenient and pleasurable.

Smart home inventions such as Awair will allow you to monitor and analyze your home’s air quality, while detecting harmful allergens and irritants in real-time.

On the entertainment front, it’s worth noting that one of the most influential devices in this category — the Jibo social robot ⁠— has gone belly up. Despite this, it is commonly speculated that the robot was well before its time, and there are now a variety of companies working on similar ways to bring AI and robotics to the home.

The Future of the Smart Home

In the next decade, the smart home is expected to grow even more autonomous.

New products will be responding to trends pioneered by many of the above products, such as voice control, homeowner data sharing, appliance connectivity, AI integration, sophisticated security systems, and smart kitchen devices.

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

We visualized the results of an analysis by the World Economic Forum, which uncovered the jobs most impacted by AI.

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools haven’t been around for very long, but they’re expected to have far-reaching impacts on the way people do their jobs. With this in mind, researchers have already begun studying the potential impacts of this transformative technology.

In this graphic, we’ve visualized the results of a World Economic Forum report, which estimated how different job departments will be exposed to AI disruption.

Data and Methodology

To identify the job departments most impacted by AI, researchers assessed over 19,000 occupational tasks (e.g. reading documents) to determine if they relied on language. If a task was deemed language-based, it was then determined how much human involvement was needed to complete that task.

With this analysis, researchers were then able to estimate how AI would impact different occupational groups.

DepartmentLarge impact (%)Small impact (%)No impact (%)
IT73261
Finance70219
Customer Sales671617
Operations651817
HR57412
Marketing56413
Legal46504
Supply Chain431839

In our graphic, large impact refers to tasks that will be fully automated or significantly altered by AI technologies. Small impact refers to tasks that have a lesser potential for disruption.

Where AI will make the biggest impact

Jobs in information technology (IT) and finance have the highest share of tasks expected to be largely impacted by AI.

Within IT, tasks that are expected to be automated include software quality assurance and customer support. On the finance side, researchers believe that AI could be significantly useful for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing.

Still interested in AI? Check out this graphic which ranked the most commonly used AI tools in 2023.

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