Early Advocates

Imagine yourself back in childhood with the assistance and insight of your parent/s in your everyday life.



You didn’t always know what the weather was before leaving, what would be the proper immediate attire or what you might need later. You didn’t always remember to shut off appliances or lights to save power nor thought to leave lights on when leaving for an extended period of time for home security.



If they were home upon your return, the lights and temperature would be welcoming and a productive schedule would be kindly enforced, like “time for dinner” or “turn that TV off, it’s time for bed”.

An Advocate’s Mindset

What’s so valuable about this early time in your life is that you are not the only one responsible for being prepared. Making the right considerations on your departure or making the best of your arrival and maximizing your comfort was informed by people with a life of experience.



As we age into adulthood, we learn the value of planning ahead and gain insight into what optimizes for most scenarios we’ll encounter. Our modern dilemma is that we rely on our memory at every given moment, like one giant computer cache, hoping to recall the right needs, inquiries and actions at the right times and places.

One problematic scenario to sum up a thousand

You’re leaving your house close to noon on a day with a broad span between high and low temperature and will likely still be out when it gets dark. You do not always check the weather and even if you do, you may only see the current temperature and assume the t-shirt you have is fine. What’s elusive about the weather report’s current snapshot view is it’s omission of the 4 hour span of rain likely to pass during the late afternoon going into the evening.



What’s antiquated about our current situation is, we have the tools and services to not have to worry about checking these things and instead could be notified of these current/future weather conditions on our departure.



Solving for these specific scenarios — We have access to the data and the problem is we’re still leveraging it with our memory as the trigger. We need better contexts and to relinquish the trigger to more reliable agents.

A breakdown of how I’ve solved for this.

Using IFTTT, Tasker, AutoNotification & AutoVoice (Plugins for Tasker), and Google Assistant (All on Android) I’ve managed to generate notifications from IFTTT regarding the likelihood of rain, identify the key phrase “rain today” and store it as a variable with Tasker via AutoNotification and created a custom Goodbye routine where google interprets “Goodbye” as saying “Tell AutoVoice Goodbye”.



The last leg of this automation hands off a command to my phone, where the stored information about the weather (using variables that reset daily) will allow it to “intelligently” inform me if I need to bring an umbrella or not — including flashing the hue light in blue above my door, just in case I don’t have my headphones in.

The key benefit is this will occur at the best time, because it’s when I’ve told it I’m leaving.



This is not a simple automation, but what’s simple is that I’ve set this up once and now my program does the rest; aside from the potential dead phone, IFTTT not working or me forgetting to say goodbye to a talking robot in my kitchen.

When everything goes as planned, this ultimately saves me time, energy and gives me a sense that we’re finally living on the cusp of another technological revolution and getting ever closer to the true smart home.

This is not AI by any means,

but our applications, access to information and our ability to identify contexts are getting advanced enough that we can reap the benefits and experience the illusion that it is.

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— To learn more about how I’ve made my home automation work as an advocate, check out my other article — “The Futuristic Home | Advanced Lighting Automation — Part 1”