Some people love technology, and the more complicated the better. Instead of needing one remote to turn on the TV, suddenly it requires three remotes, your smartphone, and a sacrificial lamb. It is things like this that have Andreas Gal and his startup, Silk Labs, questioning how smart the smart home really is.
Gal believes that grabbing your phone, opening an app, and then turning on the lights has actually made the entire process longer and more drawn out than just flipping a switch. That is where Silk Labs new operating system, also called Silk, comes into play. This operating system would try to make electronics and devices within a home have more ‘computational smarts’ so they would be less reliant on smartphones and the cloud, according to Fast Company.
This would require hardware companies to license Silk and use them in their products, which may be an overly ambitious goal. But Silk Labs is not just sitting back and waiting for this to happen. They are showing off what Silk can do by building it into Sense, a device that can perform tasks such as using facial recognition to notice when a certain person has entered the room and then change things like lighting or music to that person’s own, custom settings.
Sense will be able to do this without needing to use the cloud because it has many of the same components used by a low-end smartphone.
