Amazon and The Proliferation of The Smart Home Appliance
Defining the parameters of data-driven marketing is becoming more vital than ever. On August 5th, 2022, Amazon signed an agreement for the acquisition of iRobot for $2.2 billion CAD. iRobot's business model is predicated upon optimizing household cleaning products. Their product line is epitomized by their best-selling vacuum cleaner: Roomba. It is the solution to uncleanliness among busy households, providing convenience, cost-efficiency, and simplifying responsibilities. iRobot, ultimately, is not just selling us a product but an escape from the drudgery of household chores.
According to Julie Shah, an Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), this paradigm shift in home automation will result in robots having enhanced abilities to anticipate our next move. Data is a critical variable for bringing this into fruition.
While creating a surplus of leisure, the prioritization of smart home devices that handle our tasks at Amazon comes at the cost of surveilling our behaviour.
The Roomba Vacuuming Trifecta: Dust, Dirt, and Digitized Floor Plans
Roomba isn’t your average vacuum cleaner—it’s more intelligent than that. It leverages internal mapping technology to visualize floors.
Roomba’s sensors work in tandem to optimize navigation and avoid inconsistencies in cleaning sessions. Room mapping is initiated by an infrared transmitter that emits a light beam. Roomba then measures the time it takes for the light beam to reflect to the infrared receiver and uses the speed of light to determine the distance to nearby objects.
An advanced model of Roomba also harvests data via a low-resolution camera. Roomba 980 and Roomba i7 serve as two models containing a camera at a 45° degree angle. In a snapshot, the smart vacuums delineate patterns in a photo to determine the most optimal pathway in cleaning an area, rather than re-visiting spots in a room. For example, vacuuming the floor in an outward spiral instead of haphazard lines saves energy and time. However, these optimizations in pathing can only be achieved with an intimate look into the layout of your home.
With the aid of these sensors, Roomba engraves a maximum of ten floor plans into its memory. Despite this additional “vacuuming” aiding in navigation and giving rise to a reality where cleaning is efficient, the information collected goes beyond keeping a room dust-free.
Consider Amazon’s footprint on other home automation products and their use.
Smile! You’re On Ring’s Camera
In 2018, Amazon acquired Ring for $1.1 million CAD, adding advanced home security to their technological frontier. Ring’s crowning achievement is its smart doorbell, which includes a high-resolution camera, an infrared motion sensor, a microphone, and a speaker. Unlike a traditional peephole, Ring operates when someone presses a home’s doorbell—upon which a signal is sent to Ring’s cloud servers through WiFi channels to notify homeowners of visitor arrivals. It enables two-way conversations via the microphone, supplemented by real-time video footage.
My first personal encounter with Ring was when I was working as a political canvasser. As I surveyed countless neighbourhoods, I grew familiar with the slight chime of the doorbell. I developed an intuitive sense of the average time a homeowner needed to access their camera and look at me before opening their door. It took 25 seconds.
A significant amount of information can be gathered from a person within those 25 seconds. A Ring setting enables households to record any visitors that ring the smart doorbell instantly.
Ring is integrated with the mobile application Neighbors, which grants users access to the camera’s footage and communication through the microphone. It can also alert nearby households by providing a platform to post videos of presumably suspicious activity. While creating some sense of safety, navigating the boundaries of the information collected from this platform by Amazon can be easily obscured by the terms of service and nature of the application. All users of Neighbours must rescind their right to keep recorded videos private to use the app. An outlined condition involves allowing Amazon to use shared content “for any purpose and in any media formats in any media channels” at the company’s discretion.
Amazon’s digital ecosystem is strengthened by its smart home appliances' capabilities to work interdependently. Roomba and Ring can be streamlined by a single cognitive assistant controlling them, which begs the question:
Alexa, What’s Your Role As A Smart Appliance?
In 2013, Amazon made their first monumental step in home automation with the acquisition of Ivona Software: a Polish company with a foundation in speech-to-text converting technology that would later be used to establish Alexa as Amazon's own virtual assistant.
Integrated with Amazon Echo, a smart speaker, Alexa engages with household members when a “wake word” is voiced. Alexa can then fulfill requests ranging from streaming a plethora of media and clarifying personal responsibilities by creating to-do lists or setting calendar reminders. To accomplish these tasks, Alexa employs automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, and other forms of narrow AI dedicated to simplifying tasks.
Among these features resides Alexa’s ability to control other smart devices, including Ring. As an example, both devices work harmoniously, with Ring providing Alexa information on visitor arrivals and Alexa greeting visitors, alerting homeowners, and leaving visitor messages.
Each conversation initiated by Alexa’s wake word is recorded and transmitted to Amazon’s cloud service to improve responses to future requests. What is the purpose of storing this data, and how is it used other than to optimize the efficiency of home appliances?
Amazon Pulling Away From Standard Marketing
Consumer data has become the emblem of status among tech giants, shedding light on the alternate uses smart home appliances can provide.
Amazon alone sold more than 100 million Alexa-enabled devices in 2019. Later in 2021, 1.4 million units of Ring doorbells were sold, accounting for 15 per cent of all video doorbell sales. Amazon’s significant access to data across homes can be leveraged to alter the trajectory of traditional marketing approaches. Despite a current marketing trend focusing on streamlining services through omnichannel experiences, appliances managed by narrow AI are likely the upcoming marketing mediums of our world.
Roomba, Ring, and Alexa are angled for prime success in the realm of push marketing—wherein saturated platforms carry and promote products. Amazon’s gains can be amplified by specifically pushing out products based on household consumption patterns extracted from smart home appliances. It's a new level of peering into the consumer’s mind as smart devices start overseeing the intricacies of shopping decisions by absorbing consumer criteria and trade-off margins. Consumers will no longer be convinced to look for products, or better yet, be recommended through them the atypical billboard advertisement or brand mobile applications, wistfully parting ways with the conception of pull marketing.
While acknowledging the utility of personalized advertisements, Amazon’s knowledge of our surroundings can be overbearing. Our data assists in creating predictive systems to determine what captures our attention (e.g. the average time it takes to skip a song through Alexa). James Kozloski, an inventor at International Business Machines (IBM), has already patented a simplified form of this technology that forecasts a consumer's needs via sensors and machine learning.
As data becomes increasingly commodified, the implications of granting tech giants access to our private lives will grow in magnitude. If left unmonitored, our homes may begin to resemble a panopticon, wherein we can be observed and influenced at all times. We must consider our willingness to make the trade-off between convenience and having the innermost parts of our daily lives recorded on the digital cloud, ready to be dispensed to sell us products via devices we initially used for one compartmentalized purpose.