All hail the future of tech-enabled dumb devices – Stacey on IoT

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All hail the future of tech-enabled dumb devices

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As technology pervades more devices, the assumption is that these gadgets should have some form of internet connection.
But some of my favorite gadgets this year have been devices or services that don’t require a connection back to the web to work.
Instead, they apply sensors and other technology in novel ways to deliver a tech-enabled product that I view as smart, but not connected.
I’m also heartened by silicon and machine learning models that are trying to bring intelligence to devices without a connection.
The machine learning and specialized chips they develop let designers use voice interfaces or other novel modes of interaction that makes devices feel “smart” without requiring connectivity.
Rob Martens, futurist at Allegion and the person responsible for the Illumiknobi, calls this style of design “techno-functional,” meaning design that pulls technology into things in ways that are scalable, secure, and simple.
Given the price, security woes, and complexity associated with setting up connected devices, as well as how ambivalent the response to many of those products has been, perhaps 2020 will be the year of techno-functional products.
Illumiknobi is a limited run device made by an experimental design group at Allegion called Pin & Tumbler.
But he isn’t alone in the pursuit of using tech to build smart products that don’t have an internet connection.
And whether we call it fuzzy tech or techno-functional, I think we’re going to see more of these devices as companies stop focusing so much on wireless connections to the internet and start using sensors and local machine learning models to put a new spin on familiar products.
As I wrote in May, the company is cramming natural language processing onto cheap chips designed for controlling everyday products.
You won’t be able to have a conversation with this style of natural language processing, but you could tell a lamp to turn on, and have that happen even though the lamp doesn’t have internet connectivity

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