Ninja Sphere is a home automation hub allowing you to interact with Voice and wave of hand. A learner, it is said to adapt to your needs.
That is good. I am very pleased with its cool looks,(All that I have seen in pictures alone, alas!) With the integration other Wireless devices at home, security ones and media ones, it can provide you a good amount of use case coverage.
One challenger to the throne was from Revolv which is bought and killed by Goodle now. (Why would google kill it? They will mostly club its technology with the Android TV and their automation ambitions and launch one or two products I guess)
Question that remains is, will Apple update their Apple TV to work as a hub for Home automation. And if and when they do it, will they make it really worth the wait?
The success of the implementation will depend a lot on the reliability of the system, as when people want to depend on the automated workflow, it should just work.
Taking the example of the universal remote at home, I took a lot of pain in mapping the buttons of remotes but that seemed to be a never ending process. It invariably happens that the button I need to press will be one that I am yet to map:-) And it became so complicated that end of the day I never used it. Where as the apps of each individual appliance still was usable for me with just one phone at hand. Now, Homekit is planning to do what universal remote did for individual remotes.
That being the case, I understand that all the functions of the individual appliances will not be taken over by Homekit and mostly it will unify the generic functions so that we can string them together. That is what a home automation should aim to achieve else it will become too tied to the products each has.
Apple has Siri with them already and should enable them to execute some of the workflows with voice. Provided Siri works perfectly. I do not know about folks in the states, here in India, I have issues with the performance of Siri. It takes a bit of time to respond and many times I get a response, "I am unable to help right now"
All being done, we may not be able to do away with the remotes as there could be less tech savvy people who will feel comfortable doing things the old way. They will not want to watch the movie on the home theater but they would definitely want to listen to music or watch the TV and their daily doze of soap. This will leave couple of remotes still on the coffee table, but I do hope, for the rest of us, we can still ask Siri to start the show some time soon.
Back to where I started off from. So will I get a Ninja Sphere? Not now atleast. Will wait to see what Apple has in making. I feel comfortable in their eco system and that has paid back well for me in ease.
