9 Reasons Why You Should Install A Voice Assistant In Your Smart Home – BGR

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Despite being one of the most transformative technologies of the last decade, the ultimate smart home has remained but a dream for most households. Smart devices can be complex, inaccessible, and often more trouble than they’re worth — even if a smart home can actually save you money. But with a voice assistant, that all changes. Smart speakers that you can talk to are a critical part of any smart home infrastructure, but many people underutilize them. After all, voice is the most intuitive way for us mere humans to interact with the world, and unlike most gadgets, it requires no training to get started as long as you’re over the age of 3.

From hands-free operation to cutting through the mess of long device lists to running a longer sequence of actions, letting a guest into your home, or just the sheer fun factor of talking to your house, here’s why you need a voice assistant, and how you can level up your smart home.

Smart homes don’t scale well, but voice control keeps them manageable. If your smart home is anything like mine, then your control center app has a page of devices and sensor readouts per room, and even then, you need to group some things to fit it on one room page. And that’s before we get to your list of custom scenes and routines. It’s a tangle of automations and capabilities, and simply finding a toggle switch for a light ends up a lot slower than that caveman-era wall switch you replaced. 

At that point, you need to start using your voice. It’s the fastest and most natural method of interaction we have; touch screens are a kludge, and even with training, typing can’t match the speed of voice for textual input. Once you get used to using your voice, it’s faster than reaching for a switch, and you’ll find you have infinite virtual switches you can press to do anything. 

Chopping onions or engrossed in building some complex Lego structure but still need to unlock the front door? We’ve all been there: voice assistant to the rescue! If your hands are otherwise occupied, wet, greasy, or covered in glue, having to whip out your phone, navigate to an app, and tap the right button can be a nightmare that’ll make you wish you never “upgraded” to a smart anything. Voice control is your gateway to the plateau of productivity where everything clicks neatly into place. 

This is especially true in the kitchen, where countless companies are lining up to sell you smart versions of appliances that often end up feeling clunkier than the dumb ones they’ve replaced. Believe me: You don’t need a smart fridge with a screen that’s going to show you advertising. On the other hand, cooking is hard enough (and if you’re anything like me, extremely messy), so simple tasks like setting a timer without touching anything can be the most satisfying. 

The best smart home tech disappears into the background of your daily life. It’s the stair light that automatically comes on if it’s dark and motion is detected; the front door that unlocks as you approach and securely locks again after you’ve entered; the dehumidifier that keeps humidity at a sensible level. When you’re building out a smart home, thinking about repetitive and tedious daily tasks and how you can make them autonomous is the best way to get started. What is the goal, and what sensor or data would it need to be activated? Start with these smart ways to use motion detectors around the home.

But when you need to manually control something, nothing beats your voice. It’s always on (to the annoyance of every parent of young children), and readily accessible. Voice control — when done right, anyway — offers the quickest, most direct route to device control without scrolling through endless menus. But that means making sure your home is divided correctly into rooms, and that devices are named in a natural way. There’s nothing more frustrating than shouting at your smart speaker for the fourth time when it can’t find a device named “pendant light” (because you called it “ceiling”). 

With a smart speaker installed in every room, your voice assistant will gain the superpower of context awareness. Commands like “turn on the lights” — which would normally result in your entire house shining like Blackpool Illuminations and waking the baby up — suddenly make a lot more sense. Otherwise, you’ll still need to specify the room with every command. 

Using a voice assistant also means you can benefit from natural language. For instance, if dimming the lights is your goal, using your phone needs a few extra steps to get there: which lights should you dim, and at what percentage? A voice assistant will default to the same lights as the room you’re situated in, thanks to context awareness, and assume a sensible value for “dim” (in my testing, Siri reduced brightness by a flat 25%, while Google opted for 30% of whatever the current brightness was). If you have a specific phrase you’d like to use, create a scene with that name — most voice assistants will default to searching scenes first. For example, “Hey Siri, good morning” will look first for a smart home scene called “Good Morning” before giving up and returning a generic response.

My phone’s smart home control app is set up with favorites just the way I like it, but my wife’s isn’t. It takes her a lot longer to find the right device, and she shouldn’t have to spend ages setting up a dashboard just to have basic control of her own home. And if a guest comes over, you either take the time to program a handheld remote control for just the important bits or effectively hand over the keys to your entire digital smart home. Either way, it isn’t ideal.

A voice assistant helps to bridge the gap, giving every household member a basic level of control for all the smart devices, as long as they know the names of assigned rooms and devices. Nearly anyone can talk, even if they muddle through their first few interactions. 

But at the same time, you can train most voice assistants to recognize particular voices, so you can still interact with your own custom routines and user profile settings. Commands like “what’s on my schedule today?” will pull from your own calendar. Even if you don’t want personalized results, though, you should still take some time to set up the respective voice matching systems because it’ll improve recognition accuracy for all the commands if it knows your particular pronunciation.

Automation isn’t just “do this one thing at this specific time or when this thing happens”; it can also mean chaining together a sequence of events. While voice assistants make precise control of a specific device easy and fast, household activities often involve more than one type of device and numerous steps. This is ripe for automation under a single routine. Family movie night might mean dimming the lights to 10%, stopping your speakers, turning on the projector, switching inputs, and closing the blinds — all of which is a tedious set of actions to do via any smart home app (or even worse, physical buttons!). But assuming your devices are smart, a single “movie time” routine that you can trigger with a voice command could do them all. 

You can even set the order of the actions and add delays between actions if necessary, as well as broadcast announcements on your smart speakers, so the whole house knows: “It’s movie time, get your snacks ready!”

Don’t underestimate the fun factor of talking to your home — like pretending you’re on the bridge of a starship. If you enjoy sleeping with some brown noise and occasional computer bleeps (don’t judge me), you can change your assistant wake word to “computer” and set up a custom routine called “engage warp drive”.

All manner of unnecessary silliness is possible with custom routines, but there’s method in the madness too: Making any activity fun means you quickly learn the intricacies of it for when it comes to the more serious tasks. For instance, I decided I needed a button to instantly play “KPop Demon Hunters” on my office Sonos. It took me the best part of a day to install Music Assistant (to unify my home smart speakers and make them addressable in Home Assistant), export a smart button from Apple Home to Home Assistant, hook into the button activity, and create a Spotify automation for a playlist. Given that was my first time delving into Home Assistant (a popular DIY smart home platform that can be installed on a Raspberry Pi), that one silly automation was a great introduction to its more complex aspects.

You probably already use your phone for everything: news, entertainment, weather, driving, scheduling, banking, shopping, and social interactions. The list of conveniences is endless, so you really don’t want to add the primitive act of turning on the lights to it, especially if it risks becoming yet another opportunity to check your notifications. Anything that can pull you away from the screen distraction and keep you grounded in the real world for a little longer is a good thing, and there’s nothing more natural than your voice. 

That said, it takes time to retrain your brain away from your phone — try deliberately leaving your phone somewhere else and only controlling your house with your voice for a while. As well as getting used to it, this will help identify any incorrectly or awkwardly named devices in your setup that need tweaking, and having to control everything one by one will quickly let you know which you can chain together in a routine. 

For the past few years, there’s been a strange disconnect between the primitive conversational capabilities of smart home voice assistants and the rapid improvements in the voice modality of leading AI models. Now those two systems are beginning to merge; or rather, the voice models are getting the access they need to control your home. Nearly all voice assistants can do basic device control, but advanced conversational abilities are now being rolled out with the use of voice mode LLMs, such as the Alexa+ upgraded virtual assistant. Google is offering similar features with Gemini on home devices. Apple is rumored to be doing something similar for an upgraded Siri experience with Apple Intelligence later in 2026. All of these take conversational abilities to another level, allowing for more natural and fluid interactions, but it’s early days yet, and global rollout is slow. 

For the lucky few who do have access, you’ll need a premium subscription to access all the features. Alexa+ costs $20/month, or is included with Amazon Prime. Google Gemini offers an upgraded smart home experience for free, but natural chat (“Gemini Live”) and natural language creation of automated routines will need a paid AI plan.