This Is the Best Way to Build a Smart Home That Won’t Always Listen to You
The very first time I turned off my bedroom light from under the covers, I was sold on smart home tech. There’s just one problem: This trick relies on placing a device that’s always listening for an activation phrase in a room where you might not want to risk accidentally recording. If that’s a dealbreaker for you, don’t worry: There are ways to build a smart home without all those microphones.
Listening is not what it says
Before we get into how to avoid always-listening smart speakers, it’s worth briefly addressing the actual privacy issue. It’s easy (and very common) to get freaked out when you’re having a conversation about something specific, only to be shown an ad for that exact thing a few hours later. Things like this have led to the common misconception that phones, tablets, and, yes, smart speakers are recording everything you say so they can show you ads. That’s not true, but the truth is worse .
In reality, smart speakers are “always listening,” but only for a specific wake word. Until that word is detected locally, no audio recording is sent to an external server. If a device were sending audio recordings of everything you say at home, it would be fairly easy to detect based on how much data these devices use on your network .
That doesn’t mean there aren’t privacy concerns. Smart speakers can activate by mistake, potentially as often as once an hour . A few seconds of recording every hour isn’t the same as constant surveillance, but if you don’t want to risk accidentally recording a particularly sensitive few seconds, here are some alternatives.
Use smart displays for complete home control
While most smart displays also come with always-listening microphones, these can usually be turned off. You’re left with a screen that you can customize with a variety of smart home controls, allowing you to adjust lighting, play music, or watch videos. And in my experience, they’re worth the money even without a voice assistant.
Most smart displays, like the Google Nest Hub or Amazon Echo Show, have physical switches that disable the microphone. This prevents any audio recording, even locally, so you don’t have to worry about accidental triggers or software updates turning it back on. Personally, I still use the Lenovo Smart Display , which, although it no longer receives updates , has a physical slider to also block the camera.
When you turn off the more surveillance-like elements, you’re left with a screen with shortcuts to control all your smart gadgets. For example, my Google Smart Display has an always-on shortcut to the kitchen lights, but it’s a swipe away to control every other room in the house. It’s also a handy way to let everyone in the house set up scenes and adjust the color of the lights without having to give everyone access to the full smart lighting app.
Customize your smartphone with even more keyboard shortcuts
Smart displays are great for one central control unit, but the beauty of voice assistants is that you can reach them from anywhere in the world. But why would you want to if your phone is already glued to your hand? Most of us, most of the time, probably don’t need anything more than our phone to control our entire smart home.
Android andiOS support customizable smart home widgets, even from the lock screen. The process will be slightly different for each manufacturer, but with a little customization, you can have a panel to quickly turn on or off any gadget you own.
Home screen widgets are often even more customizable. I ’ve been using Philips Hue bulbs for years , so I have a collection of shortcuts from the Hue app on my home screen page. However, the Google Home app also has its own shortcut widget that you can customize with room-wide control across several different categories of devices. So no matter how you prefer to control your devices, there are options.
Use voice commands on the phone you control
It’s not necessarily the “listening” part that bothers most people, but the “always” part. Luckily, you don’t have to give up voice control entirely if you’re willing to use your phone instead of a smart speaker. Gemini on Android and Siri on iOS both support smart home commands, and they’re generally the same commands you’d use on their respective smart speakers.
On Android in particular, the experience is a bit better. Look, right now, Google’s suite of smart speakers and displays are still stuck with Google Assistant . It’s a clunkier, more finicky voice control scheme. Gemini, on the other hand, is much better at understanding both the time and natural language commands.
You can set Gemini as your default voice assistant on Android (it may already be installed by default) and use it to control your smart home devices. You may have to open Gemini’s settings and go to Apps > Device Management to enable Google Home, but once you do, you can instruct Gemini to control your smart home gadgets. Gemini’s “Saved Info” feature is also a handy tool for combining multiple commands into a single keyboard shortcut.
You can still use your smart speaker without a microphone
Smart speakers are, well, speakers. They can play music, sound alarms, or broadcast messages between rooms. Most of them don’t always have to listen to you. If you like the convenience of voice commands but still want to maintain your privacy, use that little mute button we mentioned earlier — it’s not just smart displays.
There are plenty of good reasons to build your smart home with devices that may have some privacy implications, but it’s not an all-or-nothing situation. In the early days, many smart home gadgets might have made privacy an afterthought, but these days you have much more control over when and how your devices listen to you.