Samsung SmartThings director of global business development Steve Herbert talks with Green Builder Media CEO Sara Gutterman about how all-in-one smart home control centers are expanding beyond devices into energy monitoring, indoor air quality and water conservation.
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Sara Gutterman: Sarah, CEO of Green Builder Media. I'm here today with Steve Herbert, the director of global business development from Samsung SmartThings. Hi, Steve.
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Steve Herbert: Hi, Sarah. Thanks for having me. So we've seen that just your average consumers started to do this. Then we started to see builders adopted in single family homes as a as a way to elevate the value of the home and the experience to the user and separate it from single family homes. Now we're seeing it smart home become smart apartment and moving into the multifamily space.
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Steve Herbert: And we're we'll see it in other markets as well. And I think that the key to all of that has just been this constant evolution and innovation by the players in here to see what's next, what can we do next? What's the next evolution, what's the next value that we can provide. And we have other systems that are now integrated into the smart home that aren't specific devices, but other systems in multifamily smart things has to integrate with many other systems that the property uses in order to to fully leverage the smart home for all the potential benefits.
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Steve Herbert: So yeah, the evolution is happening not in just where smart home is being used, but what it can do, you know, and that's expanding as well. And I think the future is bright. But energy is one of the biggest concerns of the homeowner that, excuse me of the homeowner, you know, how to save it, how to be greener for the planet.
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Steve Herbert: You know how to how to change the way that we live in our homes to be more efficient. And same with things like air quality, you know, the the ability to control the health of your living environment is really, really crucial to, you know, the way that we live. And so it's really important for people, these two elements.
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Steve Herbert: And yet the smart home had never addressed them before. So when you look at something like a Samsung SmartThings, it has the ability to automate things. One of the big opportunities in energy is to take user behavior out of the equation. You know, a builder, for example, can make a home more efficient with thicker, better insulated walls with more efficient appliances and other systems.
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Steve Herbert: But they can't necessarily do anything about the user's behavior. And sometimes that can make all the difference in the world where smart home comes in is that smart home can take and automate this for the homeowner so that they don't really have to lift a finger. They just need to set it and forget it. And then the home will will save energy automatically.
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Steve Herbert: Still, people didn't really know how much they were spending or where they were spending their money on energy. And so we created something called SmartThings energy, which basically gives you a day by day view by week by month that you can actually see where you spent energy in the home. This is called disaggregation. It's going to tell you not just how much you spend overall, which you get from your bill, but where you spend it.
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Steve Herbert: And and it tells you things that can be really, really useful to you. Like, oh wow, I'm wasting a lot of energy during this period of the day and it's not necessary. So I'm going to automate that out. And with SmartThings energy, we're looking to expand the number of things that we can monitor in the home to not just include energy, but to include natural gas or some other form of energy or and also water, so that we have the ability to track that and show the consumer how much they're using and where they might save.
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Steve Herbert: We also integrate, for instance, with sprinkler controllers that are designed to, based on the weather, to automatically change their watering schedule so that if it's rained, it won't water. If it's about to rain, it won't water. And it keeps track of the, the, the, the humidity and the soil and things like that are just amazing technologies for water conservation that the smart home, smart home is brought brought to the market.
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Steve Herbert: I think builders in particular have been focused on health and wellness because so many things can impact it. You know, the building products that go into the home can off gas elements that are just sitting in your home. And when we build homes that are particularly energy efficient, they have to be able to maintain less airflow in and out of the home.
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Steve Herbert: And so what can happen is these pollutants that come up in the home and they can be from many different sources, can just remain there and not be and not be expelled from the home through a normal aspiration, you know, through the walls of the home. And so we have to find ways to mechanically get them out. Air purifiers, like Samsung offers an air purifier that's connected to smart things can actually reduce the pollutants in the air.
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Steve Herbert: It can it can take out volatile organic chemicals. It can take out small particles of dust. We have something in SmartThings, actually, that's called SmartThings air, and it can be connected to air quality sensors that you put in your home. That will actually tell you what the level of certain pollutants are in the air can alert you to.
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Steve Herbert: It can kick on the air purifier for you automatically. And this is going to really, really help a lot. One of the things I'm kind of excited about is what we call car to home connection. So putting smart things in the car so that, you know, through your infotainment system in your car, you can open your garage, you could change the heating and air controls in the house to get it ready when you're coming home, something like that.
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Steve Herbert: Or, you know, simply to check on things when you're away, you're on the way to the airport. Whatever the case might be. You know, having that control from the car is a new element of connectivity. You know, we're away from our homes so much these days, you know? And so the ability to stay connected to our family and to what's going on in the home, I think is really important.
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Steve Herbert: You know, right now it's a very much a preprogramed experience. You tell your home exactly you want what you want it to do under certain conditions, at certain times. But having your home be able to put two and two together to have a better understanding of what's happening in the home, and then to respond more specifically to that is, is the next generation of will automate home.
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Steve Herbert: And, you know, identifying particular people at the doorbell is something that some companies are working on right now. You know, others, of course, are working on artificial intelligence to anticipate or to interpret what you're saying, you know, like five, five different people will say the same thing five different ways. But voice control systems use artificial intelligence to figure out that they're actually all asking for the same thing, right?
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Steve Herbert: So we'll see this technology continue to be a bigger part of the smart home in different ways.
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Sara Gutterman: Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your insights. Fascinating stuff and just really appreciate you being here with us today.
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Steve Herbert: Thanks for the opportunity, Sarah. Always enjoy that.