Google home has arrived, now imagine yourself living alone, waking up in the morning. Your closets picks up what you should wear and your bathroom prepares you a shower. Then you go to your kitchen and your breakfast is ready. Your car is ready and you tell it where to drive you. And of course, your car decides the safest and the fastest route to your destination. When you go out, your house turns on all the security devices and waits for your return. Sounds like a distant future? Well, Google and Amazon started that future a while ago, and it seems pretty close. The future is called smart home technology.

Google home and what do we get from it?

We all love to make our lives easier. Take of the burden of thinking about things that we routinely do every day. Most of our home devices already have many ways to connect to each other. We can connect our smartphone to our TV, tablet to Bluetooth speakers, etc. So this technology is just a step up, nothing more. Or is it?

Amazon started it all. With Amazon’s Alexa you can control your home devices with your voice. You can control your lights, fan, TV, music…And the list of devices is growing. Plus, most manufacturers build Alexa compatible devices, right now! Just imagine, in the future you could buy a TV and it would be designed for smart home. Naturally, we didn’t have to wait long to see competition.

Google saw the potential of Alexa and decided to create their own smart home system. Google home works just like Alexa, with all other Google services included. So instead of just controlling your home appliances, Google home lets you do more. You can ask questions, play YouTube videos, all that using just your voice. So yes, Google has an upper hand when it comes to technology, but when it comes to market, Amazon is still in the lead.

In the end, it seems as though the customers will profit from this battle. With two manufacturers fighting for the market, prices will go down, and the technology will get better. We will have better smart home systems, with more home appliances integrated. Who knows, maybe we could even get artificial intelligence home systems pretty soon.

This is where Mark Zuckerberg and his own smart home system will have a chance to show its magic.   Recently, CEO and Co-founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg, showed the world Jarvis. Jarvis is an AI home system that’s yet to be developed in full. For now we have only a glimpse of the third racer in this smart home technology run for glory.

Police, my house is hacked!

We all remember that incident with Jeep Cherokee, when the vehicle was hacked through Wi-Fi. Hackers took control of the car and showed how easy it was to breach the firewalls. As a result, people from FCA pulled back all the cars to factory floor.

Now imagine someone hacking into your smart home system. Think that’s not possible? Think again. Security is an issue for any system made by man. So, we have to ask ourselves are we ready to put everything we have online? Can we trust the safety of our home, of our loved ones to a program?

It’s safe to say that it will take a while until we have the confidence to trust these home systems with more than our lights. This is why it’s good that we have both Google and Amazon fighting for the throne. This means that both companies will work hard to make their systems reliable and safe. However, even then we cannot be 100% sure for our own safety.

Up until now, there have been no reports of security issues with Google Home or Amazon Alexa. Google is known for great security and Amazon has trust of its customers. So maybe these two will make a good job with their smart home projects.

For what it’s worth, smart homes are a thing now. And with Google lunching Google Home, we are a step closer to that future from the beginning. The question is, with our devices getting smarter will we get smarter, too? Or shell we give in the easy life and eventually forget simple tasks as turning up the volume on our TV?