The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Smart Homes: A Survey-Based Study on Adoption, Problems, and Expectations

Abstract

Smart homes have gradually become a key factor in modern living, and AI has played an increasingly important role in making smart homes more useful, automated, and personalized. Based on the context, we set out to understand what people believed about consumer adoption of AI-powered smart homes, i.e., perceptions about current adoption/usage; existing difficulties and shortcomings of AI-powered smart homes adoption/usage; and expectations regarding the usage of this new technology in the future. Based on surveying 75 people via questionnaire and reviewing previous literature, we obtained these results below. People involved in the questionnaires showed a relatively high rate of smart home ownership and had also experimented with different functions of smart homes, with 89% using at least one such product. The most dominant reason for them to accept such product types was convenience with use and voice control being rated as the highest functions. Nevertheless, consumers felt its notable shortcomings among future intelligent home potential users: nearly half encountered various types of incompatibility issues of products (56%), instability of usage (50%), privacy violation risks and fears about data leaks (40%), while another 38% noticed exorbitant price levels. Simultaneously, they looked forward towards a variety of developments in this area, e.g., more personalization functions (e.g., personally-designed scenarios such as a Smart Home that dims the lights for you and lowers the room’s temperature toward bedtime for the ideal body temperature range, 77%) and linking local communities’ services to future technologies used within smart homes can greatly enrich the consumer experience (69%). Insights mentioned were found by looking further into the reasons for acceptance/difficulties/detriments of smart home technology based upon prior related research efforts; it demonstrated that although AI is helpful in enabling consumer lifestyles, it can better assist the consumer community as we move towards developing technologies around the core function areas, as outlined below, e.g., it will improve the existing drawbacks which we discussed above (such as guaranteeing cross-device compatibility, eliminating unstable features during usage, minimizing costs and charges of data usage, etc.), which would represent an opportunity in allowing artificial intelligence technologies to create benefits and advantages for the general populace through its continued application across diverse fields from home electrical appliances, civic infrastructure services (telecoms) to finance and insurance operations. Though minimal, sample populations within any field are not equal to all (not very many responses of older age participants were observed), these insights could help researchers to further examine smart home-related behavior factors among consumers henceforth as well as inform ongoing smart home innovation, especially AI-powered automation technology designs, directions of improvement accordingly.