What does a smart device really mean?
There is a lot of buzzwordy surround the world of technology. There is nothing new with that. Top among the latest buzzwords is ‘smart devices’. Any product you see around you is getting a chip on it and is being labeled as smart. Some of them are great examples of the marriage of software and hardware that culminate in a product that makes life easier. However, the majority of them are essentially redundant. It is somewhat akin to the dot-com boom of 2001. “Let’s put a .com to the name” and voila, the stock valuation shoots up.
“A device that has interconnection, automation, assistance and self-upgradation capabilities with clear gain in efficiency due to these attributes is a smart device”
Let’s take a step back and understand the very essence of these terms. This will help us figure out the true meaning of these sci-fi-sounding words. Consequently, it shall help us differentiate the pseudo-smart devices from the smart ones. Firstly, let’s start with dumb devices. Well, these are not as dumb as they are shown to be. You were perfectly using your everyday things perfectly earlier, and just adding a chip onto something won’t make it redundant. Let’s put it this way: dumb devices are essentially those, which lack some or all of these interconnections, automation, assistance, and self-upgradation capabilities. If you bought a traditional gas-cooktop, which works as per your setting, that is also a dumb device, same is the case of most of the non-electronic controlled vehicles. Next in line is the automated devices that can take decisions based upon certain programs. These programs are either based on condition-based logic or a lookup table. The engine in a typical internal combustion engine car can essentially take tens of small but helpful decisions on its own, based upon the range of sensors that feed data into the electronic control unit. Here we talk about automated devices that are a step up from non-automated ones. As per the marketing pushed by the start-ups, consulting companies, and like, both automated and non-automated devices are sometimes put under the category of dumb devices, however, that is debatable.
On the other hand, there are smart devices which by the very definition, should aid in their use, due to the presence of onboard decision-making abilities based on sensors and they should be interconnected with the network of other such devices, have self-upgradability, and offer assistance that would not be just automated but should go a step beyond that. These devices should take control of certain events and reduce the involvement of the user. This is where most of the products are misleading. While the self-drive cars of Tesla are a good example of a smart device which in this case is a smart car, there are some like smart air-conditioners which when analyzed thoroughly, seem like a gimmick. Here’s why: the manufacturer of this particular AC has essentially put a wireless transmitter that sends the temperature and humidity sensor data to a smartphone app where the user can adjust the settings as per their liking. This is just an example of a new channel of ‘Human-computer-interface’. It is like adding a new remote control not adding ‘smartness’. For this device to be truly smart, it needs to have an ‘intelligence engine’. A brain that can collect data, process it, and decide the cooling curve, humidity levels on its own and help you reduce both electricity bills as well as increase your comfort levels. A similar story is there in many cases where essentially a sensor sends data to a smartphone and they call it a smart device. Well, finally, could we call a smartphone a smart device? In its native form, the smartphone was used to categorize phones that ‘behaved like a computer’ with downloadable apps and used internet access to run them, had a touchscreen interface. Regardless of that, it fulfills the criteria for interconnection, automation, assistance, and self-upgradation. A smartphone is undeniable a smart device. Sometimes, the smart devices have automatic settings set as default like having resolutions for Youtube(read more).
Coming to the final buzzword ‘intelligent’. This is another area of confusion, or rather opportunism for the marketeers of certain products who are misusing it to such an extent, that it even results in fading of the value associated with the intelligence of devices. Intelligence is defined as “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills” this holds true for both humans as well as machines. These abilities in quantitative, verbal, emotional or spatial dimensions would allow the machine to act and behave in a similar manner as human beings. An example of this is the voice assistant on your phone. It may be Siri or Android Assistant or Alexa. All of them use AI to interact with the user in a human-like manner. We are nowhere close to having a detailed and lucid conversation with a friend but it can get basic tasks done like setting up reminders, telling a joke, reading out the news, etc. In the case of a car, the intelligent car would be again exemplified by our example of Tesla model ‘X’. Self-drive cars use advanced intelligence in a number of ways: artificial vision, image processing, decision making and even giving up the control to humans when it is beyond its boundary conditions. As I write this article, Grammarly is helping me eliminate some embarrassing spelling and grammatical errors. Is it intelligent or just smart? Yes, it is intelligent. While MS Word’s spell check uses the lookup-table along with morphology and n-grams, it has inherent limitations when it comes to words that are not part of the system. It also faces issues in contexts that its algorithm was not programmed to handle. On the other hand, Grammarly is vastly superior in both spelling and grammar recommendations because it also learns from the use of language and adjusts itself. It ‘learns’ from the writings and that helps the model to get trained in nuances. It can offer tone and context-specific suggestions too, which are all signs of intelligence.
