Smart homes bring a smarter experience to our lives, allowing us to remotely control devices like air conditioners even before we arrive home. To enhance everyone's understanding of smart homes, this article will introduce their functions and their relationship with consumers. If you are interested in smart homes, please continue reading.
I. Functions of Smart Home
1. Always-on online network services, with constant internet connection, provide convenient conditions for working from home.
2. Security and Prevention: Intelligent security systems can monitor in real time for unauthorized intrusions, fires, gas leaks, and emergency calls. Once an alarm is triggered, the system automatically sends an alert to the central control center and activates relevant electrical appliances to enter emergency response mode, thus achieving proactive prevention.
3. Intelligent and remote control of home appliances, such as scene setting and remote control of lighting, automatic control and remote control of electrical appliances, etc.
4. Interactive intelligent control: Voice control of smart home appliances can be achieved through voice recognition technology; proactive action response of smart home can be achieved through various active sensors (such as temperature, sound, motion, etc.).
5. Automatic environmental control. Such as a home central air conditioning system.
6. Provide comprehensive home entertainment, such as home theater systems and central home background music systems.
7. Modern kitchen and bathroom environment. This mainly refers to integrated kitchens and integrated bathrooms.
8. Family Information Services: Managing family information and contacting the community property management company.
9. Family financial management services. Providing financial management and consumption services online.
10. Automatic maintenance function: Smart home appliances can automatically download and update drivers and diagnostic programs directly from the manufacturer's service website via a server, enabling intelligent self-diagnosis of faults and automatic expansion of new functions.
After a long, tiring day at work, returning home and unlocking the door automatically deactivates the home security system, gently illuminates the hallway lights, and activates the air conditioning and ventilation system. Your favorite background music softly begins to play – a truly delightful experience. And all of this can be controlled with a single remote. Every night, all the curtains automatically close on a set timer. Before falling asleep, you can activate the "Goodnight" mode on the bedside panel to turn off all the lights and appliances you want to turn off, while the security system automatically activates and goes into alert mode. Before leaving the house, simply press a button to turn off all the lights and appliances. In this era of smart networks, life is becoming increasingly intelligent!
II. How to get consumers to actively engage with smart homes
In fact, judging from the trends of companies in the smart home category in 2023, the industry has never stopped innovating in the field of smart homes. However, from the consumer's perspective, there has always been a gap between these technological innovations and consumers.
In other words, how to make consumers aware of the ever-evolving smart home technologies has become one of the biggest challenges in the promotion and development of the smart home product category.
Generally, consumers actively engage with smart home products in two ways: through individual smart devices and through whole-house smart systems. Among these, engaging with individual smart devices is more common among younger consumers: due to limited budgets and the inability to retrofit large appliances into rented apartments, young users with limited purchasing power prefer to buy individual smart devices and utilize various open interconnect protocols to build low-cost smart home systems.
In contrast, customized smart home solutions are more commonly found among middle-aged customers with a certain level of purchasing power, whether they are decorating a new house or renovating an old one. However, these consumers have one thing in common: rather than gradually building their own smart home system, they prefer to purchase a complete "smart home solution" and equip all smart home devices from the same brand at once.
However, this seemingly simple one-stop purchasing approach has brought new problems in practice: most smart home brands do not actually have their own smart home design teams, and still rely on a nationwide network of dealers. Consumers with whole-house smart home needs are introduced by designers or search the market to proactively contact these "whole-house smart home design teams," who then design a whole-house smart home solution based on their experience and available inventory.
This also means that new technologies and products from smart home brands must go through "intermediaries" to reach end consumers, affecting the speed at which new smart home technologies are adopted in the whole-house smart home field. Take Xiao Lei's friend Q, who is preparing to renovate his new house, as an example. With Xiao Lei's help, Q personally experienced the latest technologies and products from different smart home brands.
However, because some brands do not provide their own design teams, Q had to seek communication with local design teams. Many new products that were favored by the brand headquarters were also abandoned because the design teams did not have the goods on hand. Q had to settle for the previous generation or even earlier smart hardware.
Of course, some smart home brands have already recognized these issues. For example, Haier's Three-Winged Bird has launched its own design platform, allowing users, designers, and dealers to communicate and preview online. Orvibo also provides one-stop customized smart solutions, offering a nationwide standardized installation service process to complete a more perfect installation service in a very short time, and providing users with exclusive pre-debugging and user guidance.
It is certain that with the popularization of the whole-house smart concept, smart home customization services will become the next "main battleground" in the smart home field in 2023 and 2024. Considering the changes in the housing supply and demand relationship in recent years, "smart renovation" of old houses may also become a new breakthrough in the smart home field next year.
