By Illustration by Samar Haddad for The Verge
My smart home journey began, like so many others, with a poorly placed light switch. My partner and I had just bought our first house, and the switch that illuminated the kitchen was in the laundry room all the way on the other side, meaning we had to wander through darkness to get to it. I hated that light switch.
So what to do? Well, I could spend a bunch of money I didn’t have to hire someone to move it, try to do it myself and accidentally burn my house down with a bad wiring job, or take the plunge on a smart home. I took the path of least resistance (that’s an electricity joke) and got started on smartening up my house.
I started out with an Amazon Echo Dot and quickly found that I hated the skills system Amazon uses; plus, the…