We love decking our home with the best smart home devices. They enable us to control our appliances with our voice, have the lights and the heating just so when we get home from work, and help us monitor our homes, even from afar. Not only that, but they help us save energy and change the way our rooms look without requiring a single splash of paint.
To create a smart home, you’ll need a smart home hub like one of the best smart displays and best smart speakers; these are the devices that your other smart home tech connects to. Devices such as Amazon Echos and Apple HomePods are smart home hubs, and an increasing number of such devices support the Matter standard, which is designed to make it easier for smart home tech to talk to other smart home tech. Without Matter, you’ll need to check whether a device works with your chosen standard. For instance, many Amazon Alexa-compatible devices aren’t compatible with Apple’s rival HomeKit platform and vice versa, so we’ve included compatibility details with all the devices below.
Many of these devices feature a voice assistant like Amazon‘s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, or Google‘s Google Assistant that interacts with you as you make commands to adjust a device or get an update on the weather. With smart home tech, you can minimize the energy consumption of your smart lights by having them turn off automatically at certain times of day (or just change color for ambiance). You can upgrade your safety with the best home security cameras…
