The Connected Home - what's next?

Amazon's patent application for a voice controlled light switch is really great to see. First Alexa stormed its way into our homes, now we will start to see the gradual (it may actually be much quicker than that!) bringing together of Smart devices; this is another great example from Amazon.

Equally, we recently saw IKEA moving into the smart home space, making it widely available and accessible to a wider demographic, as well as neatly fitting new features into existing designs. 

This for me highlights three things:

1. Smart devices are no longer the toy of the early adopters/geeks
2. They reached a general level of acceptability and usefulness for all to benefit from 
3. It is now straight forward enough for Joe Public to install and manage that it won't cause a deluge of after sales enquiries. 

Coincidentally,  I'm a member of the Facebook Amazon UK user group and it amazes me how many folks are so advanced with programming their homes and connected devices.  Really interesting and inspiring! 

It will be really interesting to see how this develops over the next 6, 12, 18 months and how insurers are able to engage and interact here.