The spoken word is a powerful thing. With very few words you can completely change your immediate circumstances. You can disarm an angry person with a gentle response. You can cheer up a sad person with words of comfort. And now, thanks to technology, you can change the mood in your home with just a few words.
There are plenty of factors that determine the mood in a home at any given point in time. Some of those things cannot be changed easily because they have to do with attitudes, emotions, etc. Other things can be easily changed. For example, you can change the mood by changing the lighting. You can change the mood by putting on a certain kind of music.
So where do the words come into play? You can change the mood, just by speaking, if you have a home automation system with voice recognition. Just issue a command and your system obeys. Vivint explained it all in a recent post discussing Valentine’s day.
Table of Contents
Smart Speaker or Hub
At the core of any voice activated home automation system is the hub. A hub is an electronic device to which all home automation devices connect. It is the central location for programming, activating and deactivating devices, and so forth. Complete home automation systems come with hubs out-of-the-box. If you build your own system from scratch, you have multiple options for hubs.
Many home automation fans started out with a smart speaker from a company like Google or Amazon. Once they discovered how much they liked the device, they started adding other equipment for controlling things like lighting and thermostats. Eventually, they built an entire home automation system using the smart speaker as the hub.
When choosing a smart speaker or hub, the one thing to pay attention to is connectivity. Almost every hub now on the market can make use of your home’s wi-fi connection. This is ideal in the sense that connecting via wi-fi also gives you remote access, as long as you have a companion app. If you are concerned about outside access, you might select a hub that communicates via Bluetooth or some other wireless technology.
Change the Lights
With hardware installed and your hub working properly, you are ready to start changing the mood in your home simply by speaking. Start with the lights. Perhaps you and your spouse are looking forward to a quiet, romantic dinner while the kids are at grandma’s house. You light the candles while your spouse tells the smart speaker to dim the lights. Done and done.
As a side note, more advanced smart home systems allow you to program different scenes for different times of the day. You can even create specific scenes for certain rooms in your house. Let us say you have a home theater. You can create a lighting scene that enhances the movie-watching experience. You can even program that scene to automatically kick in when you start your home theater system. The mood is instantly set as the opening credits roll.
Up the Temperature
After dinner, you and your spouse are snuggling up on the couch watching your favorite movie. You suddenly realize that you are both cold. That is not good. How can you be romantic when you are shivering? Speak a word and you can solve the problem from the couch. Just tell your smart speaker to increase the temperature by a few degrees. In no time at all, you will both be warm again.
Now picture a similar scenario during the summer months. Suffering inside a hot house can make everyone miserable in no time at all. Cool the temperature and your tempers by telling your smart home hub to turn down the temperature a few degrees. Then head off to the refrigerator for a cold drink. Everyone will feel cooler in mere minutes. You will smile because you made the adjustment without ever touching the thermostat.
Liven up the Party
A few weeks after your romantic dinner you might be hosting a party for family and friends. Everyone’s out back, enjoying the sprawling deck and in-ground pool. Yet something is wrong. You look around and suddenly realize that the party is too subdued for your tastes. Now what do you do?
Liven up the party by changing the lighting and music. Just by speaking, you can command your home automation system to flood the pool with bright lights. After that, tell the system to cut the elevator music and replace it with some dance rhythms. Suddenly your party goes from drab to exciting. You made it all happen just by speaking.
You will also be the envy of all of your party guests. They will be amazed at how easy it is to make changes just by speaking to your smart home system. Expect them to pepper you with questions for the rest of the evening. By the time everyone is ready to go home, you will be feeling pretty good about both your party and your decision to make your home smart.
Adjust Your Attitude Manually
The point of all of this is to say that the external influences that add to the mood in your home can be changed fairly easily. Thanks to home automation, you can adjust the mood simply by issuing voice commands relating to lighting, temperature, music, and more. The one thing home automation cannot do is adjust attitudes.
If the mood in your home is not pleasant because of bad attitudes, the only solution is to change those attitudes. Unfortunately, that cannot be done automatically. Attitudes have to be adjusted manually. Doing so is well worth it.
In the meantime, understand that home automation technology can do amazing things. The technology has come a long way over the last decade – so much so that many of the menial tasks we used to do by hand can now be done by speaking. How cool is that?
