Smart home industry is thriving thanks to the adoption voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Siri and decreasing product prices. Two home appliance giants from South Korea, Samsung and LG, have also built up their smart home platforms and applications. However, they plan to tackle the market with different strategies.
Smart home industry is thriving thanks to the adoption voice assistants such as Amazon Alexa and Siri and decreasing product prices. Two home appliance giants from South Korea, Samsung and LG, have also built up their smart home platforms and applications. However, they plan to tackle the market with different strategies.
Samsung created a platform called the SmartThings, which not only supports all connected home appliances made by the company, but also bridges with other home products. Companies including Philips Hue, Yale, D-Link, Honeywell and Yale, have made their smart home gadgets controllable by Samsung’s SmartThings Hub.
Furthermore, Samsung also developed its own AI assistant Bixby. The company is expected to make Bixby compatible with all Samsung products as well as the SmartThings platform. A home smart speaker powered by Bixby may also hit the market. Currently Bixby only works in Samsung’s flagship smartphone.
Samsung even owns an IoT operating system called Tizen, which all Samsung smart home appliances depend on. Samsung provides APIs so that developers can easily integrate Bixby and Tizen into their smart home products.
Nonetheless Samsung is not isolating its smart home products in the industry. SmartThings also works with other popular voice-control devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home.
The company creates its own ecosystem that gives it a certain level of control, while also building partnership with other players in the industry.
LG doesn’t have a big platform to support other manufacturers or have its own AI voice service. Instead, the company adopts an open strategy that uses AI services from Amazon and Google. Almost all of LG’s appliances will ship with Alexa or Google Assistant support.
The open strategy also applies on the operating system. LG uses the webOS system for its smart televisions and refrigerators, and Windows 10 and Ubuntu for its refrigerators and robots.
However, LG did say it is looking to acquire an AI company for its smart home department. The company’s SmartThinQ platform currently connects with its own appliances and uses AI to learn users’ everyday behavior pattern in order to suggest a better use of home gadgets.
It’s still hard to determine which strategy holds the advantage to win the market. More players, such as Siemens and Miele from Europe, and some others from China, are entering the market. The good news is that consumers are adopting smart homes and purchasing more connected gadgets for their homes.