Smart Home Awards 2023
The new devices are amazing. The speed of innovation is amazing. But, in truth, that’s only half the story. The other half is this: Smart home devices are beginning to work together. The age of the siloed system is over. Suddenly products support Android and iOS. Soon enough, Alexa and Siri will sing in two-part harmony. In the meantime, remote access is becoming as common as solar panels.
What does this mean for the future of smart home devices? In a word, proliferation. Functionality is itself an exponential function. Smart home devices are getting massively more useful precisely because they do talk to each other.
Today's Top Deals
So do SPY’s expert testers, who have spent the last year working with (and occasionally breaking) dozens of dozens of devices in search of the best. This year, we’ve broken up our winners into five categories representing the five core functions: entertainment, security, communication, convenience, and comfort.
Security
This past year was huge for security devices. Cameras proliferated. Smart door knobs turned ubiquitous. These devices are not just becoming more common, they are becoming more practical – former deterrents are becoming tools.
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Entertainment
Are you not entertained? You should be. It takes more than flashy visuals to keep our attention. Over the past year, we’ve seen speakers that leverage spatial audio, TV backlights that extend the visual experience beyond the small screen, and even projectors that can match their flatscreen counterparts when it comes to peak brightness.
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Convenience
No one has ever gone broke selling people back their time in bulk. And that is clearly the intent of many device manufacturers doing creative work at the edge of the chore economy. Unpaid labor – all the housework that matters so much – is being pawned of (slowly) on the machines. That’s all for the better.
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Comfort
No smart device is smart enough to know what its users want, but intuitive design lives right next door to that can of intuition. Increasingly, smart comfort devices allow users to customize their spaces to suit their needs and mellow the hell out after a long, tech-enabled day.
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Communication
If a device bleeps in the forest and no one is there to hear it, it has a pretty bad voice interface. A handful of new devices – only a handful, to be frank – are still innovating in the communication space, but those few are going to be big winners.
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